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~V,^'7 SL.

■1

Ill rinii—iiiii ■iM.^Mifci^^^fc,

THE WORKS OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

ELKHORN EDITION

Volume XX.

This uniform edition as first issued
was limited to i)io copies, of
which 60 copies were not for sale.
There have been sold to the public
2^0 copies and 1000 copies are now
included in the present Elkhorn
Edition, of which this is

No...

Lii.

V ' II

l|\^IV^i!^ %llAiir.aT

• \ li

Throdore Rooscvctt

THE STRENUOUS LIFE

Essays and Addresses

By
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1906

v3\)

by
THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY

THE CHURCHMAN COMPANY

This edition of "The Strenuous Life** is issued under special
arrangement with Thb Century Company

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use !

As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three stms to store and hoard myself.

i\nd this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star.

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

. . . My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the simshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil ;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done, —

Push oflf, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding fturows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Ten nyson *s ' ' Ulysses. ' '

Ja! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben,

Dass ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss;

Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,

Der t&glich sie erobem muss.

Und so verbringt, umrungen von Gefahr,

Hier Kindheit, Mann und Greis sein tuchtig Jahr.

Solch* ein Gewimmel mOcht* ich sehn,

Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehn.

Goethe* s '* Faust."

BXBCUTIVB MANSION
ALBANY, N. Y., SBPTBMBBR, XQOO

iii

C O N T K N T S

CIIAPTRR I

pa(;b
The Strenuous Lifk i

CIL\PTER II
Expansion and Peacb 23

CHAPTER III
Latitude and Longitude among Reformers 39

CHAPTER IV
Fem.o\v-Feeling as a Political Factor 63

CHAPTER V
Civic II klpfulness 87

CHAPTER VI
Character and Success 107

CHAPTER VII
The Eighth and Ninth Commandments in Politics. 119

CHAPTER VIII
The Best and the Good 127

CHAPTER IX
Promise and Plrfoumance 135

Contents vi

CHAPTER X

PACK

The American Boy 147

CHAPTER XI
Military Prkparbdness and Unpreparedness 159

CHAPTER XII
Admiral Dewey 170

CHAPTER XIII
Grant 197

CHAPTER XIV
The Two Americas 210

CHAPTER XV
Manhood and Statehood 231

CHAPTER XVI
Brotherhood and the Heroic Virtues 247

CHAPTER XVII
National Duties 263

CHAPTER XVIII
The Laror Question 283

CHAPTER XIX
Christian Citizenship 303

ILLUSTRATIONS

Theodore Roosevelt Frontispiece

Abraham Lincoln ii6

George Dewey 182

Ulysses S. Grant 200

VII

THE STRENUOUS LIFE

Spbbch Before the Hamilton Club,
Chicago, April io, 2899

III

THE STRENUOUS LIFE

CHAPTER I.

THE STRENUOUS LIPE.

IN Speaking to you, men of the greatest city of
the West, men of the State which gave to the
country Lincohi and Grant, men who pre-
eminently and distinctly embody all that is most
American in the American character, I wish to
preach, not the doctrine of igrjoble ease, but the
doctrine of the strenuous life, (the life of toil and *-- ^-^ \
effort, of labor and strife ; \o preach that highest
form of success which conies, not to the man who
desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does
not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from ,

bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid
ultimate triumph.
A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which
/springs merely from lack either of desire or of
^ power to strive after great things, is as little
worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only
that what every self-respecting American demands

4 The Strenuous Life

from himself and from his sons shall be demanded
of the American nation as a whole. Who among
you would teach your boys that ease, that peace,
is to be the first consideration in their eyes — to be
the ultimate goal after which they strive? You
men of Chicago have made this city great, you men
of Illinois have done your share, and more than
your share, in making America great, because you
neither preach nor practise such a doctrine. You
work yourselves, nd you bring up your sons to
work. If you are rich and are worth your salt,
you will teach your sons that though they may
have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness ; for
wisely used leisure merely means that those who
possess it, being free from the necessity of working
for their livelihood, are all the more botmd to carry
on some kind of non-remtmerative work in science,
in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical
research — work of the t3rpe we most need in this
country, the successful carrying out of which
reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not
admire the man of timid peace. We admire the
man who embodies victorious effort ; the man who
never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help
a friend, but who has those virile qualities neces-
sary to win in the stem strife of actual life. It is
hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to
succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.
Freedom from effort in the present merely means

hru

The Strenuous Life 5

that there has been stored up effort in the past.
A man can be freed from the necessity of work
only by the fact that he or his fathers before him
have worked to good purpose. If the freedom
thus purchased is used aright, and the man still
does actual work, though of a different kind,
whether as a writer or a general, whether in the
field of politics or in the field of exploration and
adventure, he shows he deserves his good forttme.
But if he treats this period of freedom from the
need of actual labor as a period, not of prepara-
tion, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps
not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is sim-
ply a cumberer of the earth's surface, and he
surely unfits himself to hold his own with his
fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A
mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfac-
tory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately
unfits those who follow it for serious work in the
world.

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist
only when the men and women who make it up
lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the
children are so trained that they shall endeavor,
not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them;
not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest tri-
umph from toil and risk. The man must be glad
to do a man's work, to dare and endure and to
labor ; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent

6 The Strenuous Life

upon him. The woman must be the house-wife,
the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and
fearless mother of many healthy children. In
one of Daudet's powerful and melancholy books
he speaks of "the fear of maternity, the hatmting
terror of the young wife of the present day." When
such words can be truthfully written of a nation,
that nation is rotten to the heart's core. When
'men fear work or fear righteous war, when women
fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of
doom ; and well it is that they should vanish from
the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn
of all men and women who are themselves strong
and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the
nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is
the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is
the nation that has a glorious history. Far better
it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious tri-
umphs, even though checkered by failure, than to
take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the
gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
If in 1 86 1 the men who loved the Union had be-
lieved that peace was the end of all things, and
war and strife the worst of all things, and had
acted up to their belief, we would have saved him-
dreds of thousands of lives, we would have saved
hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides

The Strenuous Life 7

saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished,
we wotild have prevented the heartbreak of many
women, the dissolution of many homes, and we
would have spared the country those months of
gloom and shame when it seemed as if otir armies
marched only to defeat. We could have avoided
all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife.
And if we had thus avoided it, we would have
shown that we were weaklings, and that we were
unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth.
Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers,
the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and
bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant I Let!
us, the diJLldren_pf the men who proved them-
selves equal to the mighty days, let us, the chil-
dren of the inisn who carried the great Civil War
to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of
our fathers that the ignoble cotmsels of peace
were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the
blackness of sorrow and despair, were tmflinch-
ingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for
in the end the slave was freed, the Union re-
stored, and the mighty American republic placed
once more as a helmeted queen among nations.
We of this generation do not have to face a taskj
such as that our fathers faced, but we have otir
tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them!
We cannot, if we would, play the £artjoL-Oii?ia,
and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease

8 The Strenuous Life

within our borders, taking no interest in what
goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling com-
mercialism ; heedless of the higher life, the life of
aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only
with the wants of our bodies for the day, until
suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of
question, what China has already found, that in
this worid the nation that has trained itself to a
career of unwarlike and isolated ease is botmd, in
the end, to go down before other nations which
have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.
If we are to be a really great people, we must strive
in good faith to play a great part in the world. We
cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we
can determine for ourselves is whether we shall
meet them well or ill. In 1898 we could not help
being brought face to face with the problem of
war with Spain. All we could decide was whether
we should shrink like cowards from the contest,
or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high
spirited people ; and, once in, whether failure or
success should crown our banners. So it is now.
/ We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront
us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philip-
pines. All we can decide is whether we shall meet
them in a way that will redound to the national
credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings
with these new problems a dark and shameful page
in our history. To refuse to deal with them at all

The Strenuous Life 9

merely amotints to dealing with them badly. We
have a given problem to solve. If we tmdertake
the solution, there is, of course, alwa5rs danger that
we may not solve it aright ; but to refuse to under-
take the solution simply renders it certain that we
cannot possibly solve it aright. The timid man,
the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country,
the over-civilized man, who has lost the great fight-
ing, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the
man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling
the mighty lift that thrills "stem men with em-
pires in their brains" — all these, of course, shrink
from seeing the nation undertake its new duties ;
shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army
adequate to our needs ; shrink from seeing us do
our share of the world's work, by bringing order
out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from
which the valor' of our soldiers and sailors has
driven the Spanish flag. These are the men who
fear i^e strenuous life, who fear the only national
life which is really worth leading^^ They believe
in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues
in a nation, as it saps them in the individual ; or
else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and
greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all
and end-all of national life, instead of realizing
that, though an indispensable element, it is, after
all, but one of the many elements that go to make
up true national greatness. No country can long

lo The Strenuous Life

endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the
material prosperity which comes from thrift, from
business energy and enterprise, from hard, un-
sparing effort in the fields of industrial activity;
but neither was any nation ever yet truly great
if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All
honor must be paid to the architects of our
material prosperity, to the great captains of
industry who have built our factories and our
railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth
with brain or hand ; for great is the debt of the
nation to these and their kind. But our debt is
yet greater to the men whose highest type is to
be fotmd in a statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like
Grant. They showed by their lives that they
recognized the law of work, the law of strife ; they
toiled to win a competence for themselves and
f those dependent upon them ; but they recognized
\ that there were yet other and even loftier duties —
duties to the nation and duties to the race.\

We cannot sit huddled within our own borders
and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of
well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what
happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat
even its own end ; for as the nations grow to have
ever wider and wider interests, and are brought
into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold
our own in the struggle for naval and commercial
supremacy, we must build up otu* power without

The Strenuous Life ix

our own bor^er3. We must build the isthmian
canal^ and we must grasp the points of vantage
which will enable us to have our say in deciding
the destiny of the oceans of the East and the West.

So much for the commercial side. From the
standpoint of international honor the argument is
even stronger. The guns that thundered off
Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but
they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove otiFT
a medieval t)n:anny only to make room for savageV
anarchy, we had better not have begun the taskjr
at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have
no duty to perform, and can leave to their fates
the islands we have conquered. Such a course
would be the course of infamy. It would be fol-
lowed at once by utter chaos in the wretched
islands themselves. Some stronger, manlienpowCT
would have to step in and do the work, and we
would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to
carry to successful completion the labors that
great and high-spirited nations are eager to under-
take.

The work mt^ust be.dpne ; we cannot escape our
responsjbifity ; and if we are worth otir salt, we
shall be glad of the chance to do the work — glad
of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of
the great tasks set modem civilization. But let
us not deceive ourselves as to the importance of
the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory into

x9 The Strenuous Life

iinderestimating the strain tt will put on otir
powers. Above all, let us, as we value our own
self-respect, face the responsibilities with proper
seriousness, courage, and high resolve. We must
demand the highest order of integrity and ability
in our public men who are to grapple with these
new problems. We must hold to a rigid accotmt-
ability those public servants who show unfaithful-
ness to the interests of the nation or inability to
rise to the high level of the new demands upon otir
strength and otu* resources.

Of course we must remember not to judge any
public servant by any one act, and especially
should we beware of attacking the men who are
merely the occasions and not the causes of dis-
aster. Let me illustrate what I mean by the army
and the navy. If twenty years ago we had gone
to war, we should have foimdj^he navy as abso-
lutely unprepared as the armyT^ At that time our
ships could not have encounter^ with success the
fleets of Spain any more than nowadays we can
put tmtrained soldiers, no matter how brave, who
are armed with archaic black-powder weapons,
against well-drilled regulars armed with the high-
est type of modem repeating rifles. But in the
early eighties the attention of the nation became
directed to otu* naval needs. Congress most
wisely made a series of appropriations to build
up a new navy, and under a succession of able and

The Strenuous Life 13

patriotic secretaries, of both political parties, the
navy was gradtially built up, until its material
became equal to its splendid personnel, with the
result that in the summer of 1898 it leaped to its
proper place as one of the most brilliant and for-
midable fighting navies in the entire worid. We
rightly pay all honor to the men controlling the
navy at the time it won these great deeds, honor
to Secretary Long and Admiral Dewey, to the cap-
tains who handled the ships in action, to the daring
lieutenants who braved death in the smaller craft,
and to the heads of bureaus at Washington who
saw that the ships were so commanded, so armed,
so equipped, so well engined, as to insure the best
restdts. But let us also keep ever in mind that all
of this would not have availed if it had not been
for the wisdom of the men who during the pre-
ceding fifteen years had built up the navy. Keep
in mind the secretaries of the navy dtmng those
years ; keep in mind the senators and congressmen
who by their votes gave the money necessary to
build and to armor the ships, to construct the
great guns, and to train the crews ; remember also
those who actually did build the ships, the armor,
and the gims; and remember the admirals and
captains who handled battleship, cruiser, and tor-
p^o-boat on the high seas, alone and in squadrons,
developing the seamanship, the gunnery, and the
power of acting together, which their successors

14 The Strenuous Life

utilized so gloriously at Manila and of! Santiago.
And, gentlemen, remember the converse, too.
Remember that justice has two sides. Be just to
those who built up the navy, and, for the sake of
the future of the cotmtry, keep in mind those who
opposed its building up. Read the "Congres-
sional Record." Find out the senators and con-
gressmen who opposed the grants for building the
new ships; who opposed the purchase of armor,
without which the ships were worthless; who
opposed any adequate maintenance for the Navy
Department, and strove to cut down the niunber
of men necessary to man our fleets. The men who
did these things were one and all working to bring
disaster on the cotmtry. They have no share in
the glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago.
They have no cause to feel proud of the valor of
our sea-captains, of the renown of our flag. Their
motives may or may not have been good, but their
acts were heavily fraught with evil. They did ill
for the national honor, and we won in spite of their
sinister opposition.

Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day.
Our army has never been built up as it should be
built up. I shall not discuss with an audience like
this the puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy
millions of freemen is in danger of losing its liber-
ties from the existence of an army of one himdred
thousand men, three-fourths of whom will be em-

The Strenuous Life 15

ployed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast
fortresses, and on Indian reservations! No man
of good sense and stout heart can talce such a
proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings
as tiie proposition implies, then we are unworthy
of freedom in any event. To no body of men in
the United States is the cotmtry so much indebted
as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the
regular army and navy. There is no body from
which the cotmtry has less to fear, and none of
which it should be prouder, none which it should
be more anxious to upbuild.

Our army needs complete reorganization, — not
merely enlarging, — ^and the reorganization can
only come as the result of legislation. A proper
general staff should be established,, and the posi-
tions of ordnance, commissary, and quartermaster
officers should be filled by detail from the line.
Above all, the army mtist be given the chance to
exercise in large bodies. Never again should we
see, as we saw in the Spanish war, major-generals
in command of divisions who had never before
commanded three companies together in the field.
Yet, incredible to relate. Congress has shown a
queer inability to learn some of the lessons of the
war. There were large bodies of men in both
branches who opposed the declaration of war,
who opposed the ratification of peace, who op-
posed the upbuilding of the army, and who even

x6 The Strenuous Life

opposed the purchase of armor at a reasonable
price for the battleships and cruisers, thereby
putting an absolute stop to the building of any-
new fighting-ships for the navy. If, dtmng the
years to come, any disaster should befall our arms,
afloat or ashore, and thereby any shame come to
the United States, remember that the blame will
lie upon the men whose names appear upon the
roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of these
great questions. On them will lie the burden of
any loss of our soldiers and sailors, of any dishonor
to the flag; and upon you and the people of this
cotmtry will lie the blame if you do not repudiate,
in no unmistakable way, what these men have
done. The blame will not rest upon the un-
trained commander of imtried troops, upon the
civil officers of a department the organization of
which has been left utterly inadequate, or upon
the admiral with an insufficient nimiber of ships ;
but upon the public men who have so lamentably
failed in forethought as to refuse to remedy these
evils long in advance, and upon the nation that
stands behind those public men.

So, at the present hour, no small share of the
responsibility for the blood shed in the Philip-
1 pines, the blood of our brothers, and the blood of
their wild and ignorant foes, lies at the thresholds
of those who so long delayed the adoption of the
treaty of peace, and of those who by their worse

The Strenuous Life 17

than foolish words deliberately invited a savage
people to plunge into a war fraught with stu-e dis-
aster for them — a war, too, in which our own
brave men who follow the flag must pay with their
blood for the silly, mock humanitarianism of the
prattlers who sit at home in peace.

The army and the navy are the sword and the
shield which this nation must carry if she is to do
her duty among the nations of the earth — ^if she
is not to stand merely as the China of the western
hemisphere. Our proper conduct toward the
tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is
merely the form which our duty has taken at the
moment. Of course we are boimd to handle the
affairs of our own household well. We must see
that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic
good sense in our home administration of city,
State, and nation. We must strive for honesty in
office, for honesty toward the creditors of the
nation and of the individual ; for the widest free-
dom of individual initiative where possible, and
for the wisest control of individual initiative where
it is hostile to the welfare of the many. But
because we set our own household in order we are
not thereby excused from pla3ring our part in the
great affairs of the world. A man's first duty is
to his own home, but he is not thereby excused
from doing his duty to the State ; for if he fails
in this second duty it is imder the penalty of

x8 The Strenuous Life

ceasing to be a freeman. In the same way, while
a nation's first duty is within its own borders, it is
not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the
world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it
merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place
among the peoples that shape the destiny of man-
kind.

In the West Indies and the Philippines alike
we are confronted by most difRcult problems. It
is cowardly to shrink from solving them in the
proper way ; for solved they must be, if not by us,
. ^ then by some stronger and more manftd race. If

^ we are too weak, too selfish, or too foolish to solve

them, some bolder and abler people must imder-
take the solution. Personally, I am far too firm a
believer in the greatness of my coimtry and the
power of my coimtrymen to admit for one moment
that we shall ever be driven to the ignoble alterna-
tive.

The problems are different for the different
islands. Porto Rico is not large enough to stand
alone. We must govern it wisely and well, pri-
marily in the interest of its own people. Cuba is,
in my judgment, entitled ultimately to settle for
itself whether it shall be an independent state or
an integral portion of the mightiest of republics.
But tmtil order and stable liberty are secured, we
must remain in the island to insure them, and
infinite tact, judgment, moderation, and courage

The Strenuous Life 19

must be shown by otir military and civil repre-
sentatives in keeping the island pacified, in relent-
lessly stamping out brigandage, in protecting all
alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to
the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The
Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their
population includes half-caste and native Chris-
tians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans. Many
of their people are utterly unfit for self-govern-
ment and show no signs of becoming fit. Others
may in time become fit but at present can only
take part in self-government under a wise super-
vision, at once firm and beneficent. We have
driven Spanish tyranny from t^ islands. If we
now let it be replaced by(^savage anarchy; otir
work has been for harm and iiot- for'"go od; 1 have
scant patience with those who fear to undertake
the task of governing the Philippines, and who
openly avow that they do fear to imdertake it,
or that they shrink from it because of the expense
and trouble; but I have even scanter patience
with those who make a pretense of hujnanitarian-
ism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant
about "liberty" and the "consent of the gov-
erned," in order to excuse themselves for their
unwillingness to play the part of men. Their doc-
trines, if carried outp^'ould make it incumbent
upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work
out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere

The Strenuous Life

in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines
condemn your forefathers and mine for ever
^having settled in these United States.

England's rule in India and Eg>^pt has been of
great benefit to England, for it has trained up
generations of men accustomed to look at the
larger and loftier side of public life. It has been
of even greater benefit to India and Egypt. And
finally, and most of all, it has advanced the cause

-N |[ of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright in
the Philippines, we will add to that national
renown which is the highest and finest part of
national life, will greatly benefit the people of the
Philippine Islands, and, above all, we will play
our part well in the great work of uplifting man-
kind. But to do this work, keep ever in mind
that we must show in a very high degree the
/qualities of courage, of honesty, and of good judg-

Nv ment. Resistance must be stamped out. The
TO:^t and all-important work to be done is to estab-
lish the supremacy of our flag. We must put
down armed resistance before we can accomplish
anything else, and there should be no parlejdng,
no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those
in oiu: own country who encourage the foe, we can
afford contemptuously to disregard them ; but it
must be remembered that their utterances are not
. saved from being treasonable merely by the fact
that they are despicable.

The Strenuous Life ai

When once we have put down armed resistance,
when once our rule is acknowledged, then an even
more difficult task will begin, for then we must see
to it that the islands are administered with abso-
lute honesty and with good judgment. If we let
the public service of the islands be turned into the
prey of the spoils politician, we shall have begun
to tread the path which Spain trod to her own
destruction. We must send out there only good
and able men, chosen for their fitness, and not
because of their partisan service, and these men
must not only administer impartial justice to the
natives and serve their own government with
honesty and fidelity, but must show the utmost
tact and firmness, remembering that, with such
people as those with whom we are to deal, weak-
ness is the greatest of crimes, and that next to
weakness comes lack of consideration for their
principles and prejudices.

I preach to you, then, my coimtrymen, that our
country caljLs not for the life of ease but for the life
of strenuous endeavor^ The twentieth centtuy
looms before us big with the fate of many nations.
If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen,
slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from
the hard contests where men must win at hazard
of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear,
liien the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us
\by, and will win for themselves the domination

22 The Strenuous Life

of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the
life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and man-
fully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed
and by word; resolute to be both honest and
brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical
methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife,
moral or physical, within or without the nation,
provided we are certain that the strife is justified,
for it is only through strife, through hard and dan-
gerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the
goal of true national greatness.

EXPANSION AND PEACE

Published in thb ''Independent/' December 21, 1899

CHAPTER II.

EXPANSION AND PEACE.

T was the gentlest of our poets who wrote:

"Be bolde! Be bolde! and everywhere, Be bolde";
Be not too bold! Yet better the excess
Than the defect ; better the more than less.

Longfellow's love of peace was profound ; but he
was a man, and a wise man, and he knew that
cowardice does not promote peace, and that even
the great evil of war may be a less evil than
cringing to iniquity.

Captain Mahan, than whom there is not in the
coimtry a man whom we can more appropriately
designate by the fine and high phrase, **a Chris-
tian gentleman," and who is incapable of advo-
cating wrong-doing of any kind, national or indi-
vidual, gives utterance to the feeling ^ the great
majority o^ manly and thoughtful m^when he
denotmces M;he great danger of indiscriminate
advocacy of peace at any price, because "it may
lead men to tamper with iniquity, to compromise
with imrighteousness, soothing their conscience
with the belief that war is so entirely wrong that
beside it no other tolerated evil is wrong. Witness
Armenia and witness Crete. War has been
avoided; but what of the national consciences

26 The Strenuous Life

that beheld such iniqtiity and withheld the
hand?"

Peace is a great good; and doubly harmful,
therefore, is the attitude of those who advocate
it in terms that would make it synonymous with
selfish and cowardly shrinking from warring
against the existence of evil. The wisest and
most far-seeing champions of peace will ever
remember that, in the first place, to be good it
must be righteous, for unrighteous and cowardly
peace may be worse than any war; and, in the
second place, that it can often be obtained only
at the cost of war. Let me take two illustrations :

The great blot upon European international
morality in the closing decade of this century
has been not a war, but the infamous peace kept
by the joint action of the great powers, while
Turkey inflicted the last horrors of butchery,
torture, and outrage upon the men, women, and
children of despairing Armenia. War was
avoided; peace was kept; but what a peace!
Infinitely greater human misery was inflicted
during this peace than in the late wars of Ger-
many with France, of Russia with Turkey; and
this misery fell, not on armed men, but upon
defenseless women and children, upon the gray-
beard and the stripling no less than upon the
head of the family ; and it came, not in the mere
form of death or impnsonment, but of tortiu'es

Expansion and Peace 27

upon men, and, above all, upon women, too
horrible to relate — tortures of which it is too
terrible even to think. Moreover, no good re-
sulted from the bloodshed and misery. Often
this is the case in a war, but often it is not the
case. The result of the last Turko-Rtissian war
was an immense and permanent increase of happi-
ness for Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, and Herze-
govina. These provinces became independent or
passed imder the dominion of Austria, and the
advantage that accrued to them because of this
expansion of the domain of civilization at the
expense of barbarism has been simply incal-
culable. This expansion produced peace, and put
a stop to the ceaseless, grinding, bloody tjn^anny
that had desolated the Balkans for so many
centuries. There are many excellent people who
have praised Tolstoi's fantastic religious doc-
trines, his fantastic advocacy of peace. The
same quality that makes the debauchee and the
devotee alternate in certain decadent families,
the hysterical development which leads to violent
emotional reaction in a morbid nature from vice
to virtue, also leads to the creation of Tolstoi's
"Kreutzer Sonata" on the one hand, and of his
tmhealthy peace-mysticism on the other. A sane
and healthy mind would be as incapable of the
moral degradation of the novel as of the decadent
morality of the philosophy. If Tolstoi's country-

38 The Strenuoo* Life

men had acted according to his moral theories
they wotdd now be extinct, and savages would
have taken their place. Unjust war is a terrible
sin. It does not nowadays in the aggregate cause
anything like the misery that is caused in the
aggregate by imjust dealing toward one's neigh-
bors in the commercial and social worid ; and to
condemn all war is just as logical as to condemn
all business and all social relations, as to condemn
love and marriage because of the frightful misery
caused by brutal and imregulated passion. If
Russia had acted upon Tolstoi's philosophy, all
its people would long ago have disappeared from
the face of the earth, and the cotintry would now
be occupied by wandering tribes of Tartar bar-
barians. The Armenian massacres are simply
illustrations on a small scale of what would take
place on the very largest scale if Tolstoi's prin-
ciples became imiversal among civilized people.
It is not necessary to point out that the teaching
which would produce such a condition of things
is fundamentally immoral.

Again, peace may come only through war.
There are men in our cotintry who seemingly
forget that at the outbreak of the Civil War the
great cry raised by the opponents of the war was
the cry for peace. One of the most amusing and
most biting satires written by the friends of tinion
and liberty diuing the Civil War was called the

Expafliion and Peace 29

"New Gospel of Peace," in derision of this atti-
tude. The men in our own cotintry who, in the
name of peace, have been encouraging Aguinaldo
and his people to shoot down our soldiers in the
Philippines might profit not a little if they would
look back to the days of the bloody draft riots,
which were deliberately incited in the name of
peace and free speech, when the mob killed men
and women in the streets and btimed orphan
children in the asyltims as a protest against the
war. Four years of bloody struggle with an
armed foe, who was helped at every ttim by the
self-styled advocates of peace, were needed in
order to restore the Union; but the result has
been that the peace of this continent has been
eflfectually assured. Had the short-sighted advo-
cates of peace for the moment had their way, and
secession become an actual fact, nothing could
have prevented a repetition in North America of
the devastating anarchic warfare that obtained
for three quarters of a century in South America
after the yoke of Spain was thrown off. We
escaped generations of anarchy and bloodshed,
because our fathers who upheld Lincoln and
followed Grant were men in every sense of the
term, with too much common sense to be misled
by those who preached that war was alwajrs
wrong, and with a fund of stem virtue deep in
their souls which enabled them to do deeds from

30 The Strenuous Life

which men of over-soft nattires would have
shrunk appalled.

Wars between civilized communities are very
dreadful, and as nations grow more and more
civilized we have every reason, not merely to
hope, but to believe that they will grow rarer
and rarer. Even with civilized peoples, as was
shown by our own experience in 1861, it may be
necessary at last to draw the sword rather than
to submit to wrong-doing. But a very marked
feature in the world-history of the present century
has been the groT?vnng infrequency of wars between
great civilized nations. The Peace Conference at
The Hague is but one of the signs of this growth.
I am among those who believe that much was
accomplished at that conference, and I am proud
of the leading position taken in the conference by
our delegates. Incidentally I may mention that
the testimony is tinanimous that they were able
to take this leading position chiefly becatise we
had just emerged victorious from our most
righteous war with Spain. Scant attention is
paid to the weakling or the coward who babbles
of peace; but due heed is given to the strong
man with sword girt on thigh who preaches
peace, not from ignoble motives, not from fear
or distrust of his own powers, but from a deep
sense of moral obligation.

The growth of peacefulness between nations,

Expansion and Peace 31

however, has been confined strictly to those that
are civilized. It can only come when both parties
to a possible quarrel feel the same spirit. With a
barbarous nation peace is the exceptional con-
dition. On the border between civilization and
barbarism war is generally normal because it
must be under the conditions of barbarism.
Whether the barbarian be the Red Indian on the
frontier of the United States, the Afghan on the
border of British India, or the Turkoman who
confronts the Siberian Cossack, the result is the
same. In the long nm civilized man finds he
can keep the peace only by subduing his bar-
barian neighbor ; for the barbarian will yield only
to force, save in instances so exceptional that
they may be disregarded. Back of the force
must come fair dealing, if the peace is to be
permanent. But without force fair dealing usu-
ally amotmts to nothing. In our history we have
had more trouble from the Indian tribes whom
we pampered and petted than from those we
wronged; and this has been true in Siberia,
Hindustan, and Africa.

Every expansion of civilization makes for peace.
In other words, every expansion of a great ^.*

civilized power means a victory for law, order, y^\
and righteousness. This has been the case in
every instance of expansion during the present
century, whether the expanding power were

82 The Strenuous Life

France or England, Russia or America. In every
instance the expansion has been of benefit, not
so much to the power nominally benefited, as to
the whole world. In every instance the result
proved that the expanding power was doing a
duty to civilization far greater and more impor-
tant than could have been done by any stationary
power. Take the case of France and Algiers.
During the early decades of the present century
piracy of the most dreadful description was rife
on the Mediterranean, and thousands of civilized
men were yeariy dragged into slavery by the
Moorish pirates. A degrading peace was pur-
chased by the civilized powers by the payment of
tribute. Our own coimtry was one among the
tributary nations which thus paid blood-money
to the Moslem bandits of the sea. We fought
occasional battles with them ; and so, on a larger
scale, did the English. But peace did not follow,
because the cotintry was not occupied. Our last
payment was made in 1830, and the reason it
was the last was because in that year the French
conquest of Algiers began. Foolish sentimen-
talists, like those who wrote little poems in favor
of the Mahdists against the English, and who now
write little essays in favor of Aguinaldo against
the Americans, celebrated the Algerian free-
booters as heroes who were striving for liberty
against the invading French. But the French

Expansion and Peace 33

continued to do their work; France expanded
over Algiers, and the result was that piracy on
the Mediterranean came to an end, and Algiers
has thriven as never before in its history. On
an even larger scale the same thing is true of
England and the Sudan. The expansion of Eng-
land throughout the Nile valley has been an
incalculable gain for civilization. Any one who
reads the writings of the Austrian priests and
laymen who were prisoners in the Sudan under
the Mahdi will realize that when England crushed
him and conquered the Sudan she conferred a
priceless boon upon htmianity and made the
civilized world her debtor. Again, the same
thing is true of the Russian advance in Asia. As
in the Sudan the English conquest is followed by
peace, and the endless massacres of the Mahdi
are stopped forever, so the Russian conquest of
the khanates of central Asia meant the cessation
of the barbarous warfare under which Asian
civilization had steadily withered away since the
days of Jenghiz Khan, and the substitution in
its place of the reign of peace and order. All
civilization has been the gainer by the Russian
advance, as it was the gainer by the advance of
France in North Africa ; as it has been the gainer
by the advance of England in both Asia and
Africa, both Canada and Australia. Above all,
there has been the greatest possible gain in peace.

34 The Strenuous Life

The rule of law and of order has succeeded to the
rule of barbarous and bloody violence. Until the
great civilized nations stepped in there was no
chance for anything but such bloody violence.

So it has been in the history of our own
country. Of course our whole national history
has been one of expansion. Under Washington
and Adams we expanded westward to the Mis-
sissippi ; under Jefferson we expanded across the
continent to the mouth of the Columbia; under
Monroe we expanded into Florida ; and then into
Texas and California ; and finally, largely through
the instrumentality of Seward, into Alaska ; while
tmder every administration the process of expan-
sion in the great plains and the Rockies has con-
tinued with growing rapidity. While we had a
frontier the chief feature of frontier life was the
endless war between the settlers and the red men.
Sometimes the immediate occasion for the war
was to be foimd in the conduct of the whites and
sometimes in that of the reds, but the ultimate
cause was simply that we were in contact with a
coimtry held by savages or half -savages. Where
we abut on Canada there is no danger of war, nor
is there any danger where we abut on the well-
settled regions of Mexico. But elsewhere war had
to continue until we expanded over the country.
Then it was succeeded at once by a peace which
has remained unbroken to the present day. In

Expansion and Peace 35

North America, as elsewhere throughout the
entire world, the expansion of a civilized nation
has invariably meant the growth of the area in
which peace is normal throughout the world.

The same will be true of the Philippines. If
the men who have coimseled national degradation,
national dishonor, by urging us to leave ttie Philip-
pines and put the Aguinaldan oligarchy in control
of those islands, could have their way, we should
merely turn them over to rapine and bloodshed
until some stronger, manlier power stepped in to
do the task we had shown ourselves fearful of
performing. But, as it is, this coimtry will keep
the islands and will establish therein a stable and
orderly government, so that one more fair spot
of the world's surface shall have been snatched
from the forces of darkness. Fimdamentally the
cause of expansion is the cause of peace.

With civilized powers there is but little danger
of our getting into war. In the Pacific, for
instance, the great progressive, colonizing nations
are England and Germany. With England we
have recently begun to feel ties of kindness as
well as of kinship, and with her our relations are
better than ever before ; and so they ought to be
with Germany. Recently affairs in Samoa have
been straightened out, although there we suffered
from the worst of all types of government, one in
which three powers had a joint responsibility (the

36 The Strenuous Life

type, by the way, which some of the anti-imperi-
alists actually advocated our introducing in the
Philippines, under the pretense of rendering them
neutral). This was accomplished very largely
because the three nations set good-humoredly to
work to come to an agreement which would do
justice to all. In the preliminary negotiations
the agents of America and Germany were Mr.
Tripp and Baron Stemburg. No difficulty can
ever arise between Germany and the United
States which will not be settled with satisfaction
to both, if the negotiations are conducted by such
representatives of the two powers as these two
men. What is necessary is to approach the sub-
ject, not with a desire to get ahead of one another,
but to do even and exact justice, and to put into
operation a scheme which will work, while scrupu-
lously conserving the honor and interest of all
concerned.

Nations that expand and nations that do not
expand may both ultimately go down, but the
one leaves heirs and a glorious memory, and the
other leaves neither. The Roman expanded, and
he has left a memory which has profoimdly
influenced the history of mankind, and he has*
further left as the heirs of his body, and, above
all, of his tongue and culture, the so-called Latin
peoples of Europe and America. Similarly to-day
it is the great expanding peoples which bequeath

Expansion and Peace 37

to future ages the great memories and material
results of their achievements, and the nations
which shall have sprung from their loins, England
standing as the archetype and best exemplar of
all such mighty nations. But the peoples that do
not expand leave, and can leave, nothing behind
them.

It is only the warlike power of a civilized people
that can give peace to the world. The Arab
wrecked the civilization of the Mediterranean
coasts, the Turk wrecked the civilization of south-
eastern Europe, and the Tatar desolated from
China to Russia and to Persia, setting back the
progress of the world for centuries, solely because
the civilized nations opposed to them had lost
t]j^e great fighting qualities, and, in becoming
c ov erpeaceful. had^pst the power of keeping peace
with a strong han^ Their passing away marked
the beginning of a period of chaotic barbarian
warfare. Those whose memories are not so short
as to have forgotten the defeat of the Greeks by
the Turks, of the Italians by the Abyssinians,
and the feeble campaigns waged by Spain against
feeble Morocco, must realize that at the present
moment the Mediterranean coasts would be over-
nm either by the Turks or by the Sudan Mahdists
if these warlike barbarians had only to fear
those southern European powers which have lost
the fighting edge. Such a barbarian conquest

ai The Strenuous Life

wocid rriean <T<fTfss war; acd the fact that :
adays the reverse takes place, and that the bar-
barians recede cr are ccnquered. with the attend-
ant fact that peace fcZcws their leiiugies sin n or
cocc:iest, is due sclely to the power of the migjity
dvilizcd races which have not lost the fitting
instinct, and which bv their expansion are grad-
zsiT.j bringing peace into the red wastes where
the barbarian oect^les of the world hold swav.

LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE
AMONG REFORMERS

Published in thb "Century." Junb, X900

CHAPTER III.

LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE AMONG REFORMERS.

ONE of Miss Mary E. Wilkins's delightful
heroines remarks, in speaking of certain
would-be leaders of social reform in her
village: "I don't know that I think they are so
much above us as too far to one side. Sometimes
it is longitude and sometimes it is latitude that
separates people." This is true, and the philos-
ophy it teaches applies quite as much to those
who would reform the politics of a large city, or,
for that matter, of the whole coimtry, as to those
who would reform the society of a hamlet.

There is always danger of being misimderstood
when one writes about such a subject as this,
because there are on each side unhealthy extrem- 1
ists who like to take half of any statement and I
twist it into an argument in favor of themselves
or against their opponents. No single sentence
or two is sufficient to explain a man's full meaning,
any more than in a sentence or two it would be
possible to treat the question of the necessity for,
and the limitations of, proper party loyalty, with
the thoroughness and justice shown, for instancy
by Mr. Lecky in his recent queerly named YOlumet
"The Map of Life."

.v-^

42 The Strenuous Life

All men in whose character there is not an
element of hardened baseness must admit the
need in otir public life of those qualities which we
somewhat vaguely group together when we speak
of "reform," and all men of sotind mind mtist
also admit the need of efficiency. There are, of
course, men of such low moral type, or of such
ingrained cynicism, that they do not believe in
the possibility of making anything better, or do
not care to see things better. There are also men
who are slightly disordered mentally, or who are
cursed with a moral twist which makes them
champion reforms less from a desire to do good
to others than as a kind of tribute to their own
righteousness, for the sake of emphasizing their
own superiority. From neither of these classes
can we get any real help in the imending struggle
for righteousness. There remains the great body
of the people, including the entire body of those
through whom the salvation of the people must
ultimately be worked out. All these men com-
bine or seek to combine in varying degrees the
quality of striving after the ideal, that is, the
quality which makes men reformers, and the
quality of so striving through practical methods —
the quality which makes men efficient. Both
qualities are absolutely essential. The absence
of either makes the presence of the other worth-
less or worse.

Latitude and Longitude 43

If there is one tendency of the day which more
than any other is unhealthy and tmdesirable, it
is the tendency to deify mere "smartness," unac-
companied by a sense of moral accotmtability.
We shall never make our republic what it should
be until as a people we thoroughly understand
and put in practice the doctrine that success is
abhorrent if attained by the sacrifice of the ftmda-
mental principles of morality. The successful
man, whether in business or in politics, who has
risen by conscienceless swindling of his neighbors,
by deceit and chicanery, by unscrupulous bold-
ness and unscrupulous cunning, stands toward
society as a dangerous wild beast. The mean
and cringing admiration which such a career
commands among those who think crookedly or
not at all makes this kind of success perhaps the
most dangerous of all the influences that threaten
our national life. Our standard of public and
private conduct will never be raised to the proper
level until we make the scoundrel who succeeds
feel the weight of a hostile public opinion even
more strongly than the scoundrel who fails.

On the other hand, mere beating the air, mere
visionary adherence to a nebulous and possibly
highly undesirable ideal, is utterly worthless. The
cloistered virtue which timidly shrinks from all
contact with the rough world of actual life, and
the uneasy, self-conscious vanity which misnames

44 The Strenuous Life

itself virtue, and which declines to cooperate with
whatever does not adopt its own fantastic stand-
ard, are rather worse than valueless, because they
tend to rob the forces of good of elements on
which they ought to be able to count in the
ceaseless contest with the forces of evil. It is
true that the impracticable idealist differs from
the hard-working, sincere man who in practical
fashion, and by deeds as well as by words, strives
in some sort actually to realize his ideal ; but the
difference lies in the fact that the first is imprac-
ticable, not in his having a high ideal, for the
ideal of the other may be even higher. At times
a man must cut loose from his associates, and
stand alone for a great cause ; but the necessity
for such action is almost as rare as the necessity
for a revolution; and to take such ground con-
tinually, in season and out of season, is the sign
of an unhealthy nature. It is not possible to lay
down an inflexible rule as to when compromise
is right and when wrong; when it is a sign of the
highest statesmanship to temporize, and when it
is merely a proof of weakness. Now and then
one can stand uncompromisingly for a naked
principle and force people up to it. This is always
the attractive course; but in certain great crises
it may be a very wrong course. Compromise, in
the proper sense, merely means agreement ; in the
proper sense opporttmism should merely mean

Latitude and Longitude 45

doing the best possible with acttial conditions as
they exist. A compromise which results in a
half-step toward evil is all wrong, just as the
opportunist who saves himself for the moment
by adopting a policy which is fraught with future
disaster is all wrong; but no less wrong is the
attitude of those who will not come to an agree-
ment through which, or will not follow the course
by which, it is alone possible to accompUsh prac-
tical results for good.

These two attitudes, the attitude of deifying
mere efficiency, mere success, without regard to
the moral qualities lying behind it, and the atti-
tude of disregarding efficiency, disregarding prac-
tical results, are the Scylla and Charybdis between
which every earnest reformer, every politician who
desires to make the name of his profession a term
of honor instead of shame, must steer. He must
avoid both tmder penalty of wreckage, and it
avails him nothing to have avoided one, if he
founders on the other. People are apt to speak
as if in political life, public life, it ought to be a
mere case of striving upward — striving toward a
high peak. The simile is inexact. Every man
who is striving to do good public work is traveling
along a ridge crest, with the gulf of failure on
each side — ^the gulf of inefficiency on the one side,
the gulf of unrighteousness on the other. All
kinds of forces are continually playing on him, to

46 The Strenuous Life

shove him first into one gulf and then into the
other; and even a wise and good man, iinless he
braces himself with uncommon firmness and fore-
sight, as he is pushed this way and that, will find
that his course becomes a pronounced zigzag
instead of a straight line; and if it becomes too
pronounced he is lost, no matter to which side
the zigzag may take him. Nor is he lost only as
regards his own career. What is far more serioxis,
his power of doing useful service to the public is
at an end. He may still, if a mere politician,
have political place, or, if a make-believe re-
fonner, retain that notoriety upon which his
vanity feeds. But, in either case, his usefulness
to the community has ceased.

The man who sacrifices everything to efficiency
needs but a short shrift in a discussion like this.
The abler he is, the more dangerous he is to the
community. The master and typical representa-
tive of a great municipal poUtical organization
recently stated under oath that ** he was in politics
for his pocket every time." This put in its baldest
and most cjmically offensive shape the doctrine
upon which certain public men act. It is not
necessary to argue its iniquity with those who
have advanced any great distance beyond the
brigand theory of political life. Some years ago
another jpublic man enunciated much the same
doctrine in the phrase, **The Decalogue and the

Latitude and Longitude 47

Golden Rule have no part in political life." Such
statements, openly made, imply a belief that the
public conscience is dull ; and where the men who
make them continue to be political leaders, the
public has itself to thank for all shortcomings in
public life.

The man who is constitutionally incapable of
working for practical results ought not to need a
much longer shrift. In every community there
are little knots of fantastic extremists who loudly
proclaim that they are striving for righteousness,
and who, in reality, do their feeble best for un-
righteousness. Just as the upright politician
should hold in peculiar scom the man who makes
the name of politician a reproach and a shame,
so the genuine reformer should realize that the
caxise he champions is especially jeopardized by
the mock reformer who does what he can to make
reform a laughing-stock among decent men.

A caustic observer once remarked that when
Dr. Johnson spoke of patriotism as the last refuge
of a scotmdrel, "he was ignorant of the infinite
possibilities contained in the word 'reform.'"
The sneer was discreditable to the man who
uttered it, for it is no more possible to justify
corruption by railing at those who by their con-
duct throw scandal upon the cause of reform than
it is to justify treason by showing that men of
shady dmracter frequently try to cover their

48 The Strenuous Life

misconduct by fervent protestations of love of
cotintry. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
exactly as true patriots should be especially
jealous of any appeal to what is base under the
guise of patriotism, so men who strive for honesty,
and for the cleansing of what is corrupt in the
dark places of our politics, should emphatically
disassociate themselves from the men whose antics
throw discredit upon the reforms they profess to
advocate.

These little knots of extremists are found
everywhere, one type flourishing chiefly in one
locality and another type in another. In the
particular objects they severally profess to cham-
pion they are as far asimder as the poles, for one
of their characteristics is that each little group
has its own patent recipe for salvation and pays
no attention whatever to the other little groups ;
but in mental and moral habit they are fimda-
mentally alike. They may be socialists of twenty
different types, from the followers of Tolstoi down
and up, or they may ostensibly champion some
cause in itself excellent, such as temperance or
mimicipal reform, or they may merely with com-
prehensive vagueness annoimce themselves as the
general enemies of what is bad, of corruption,
machine politics, and the like. Their policies and
principles are usually mutually exclusive; but
that does not alter the conviction, which each

Latitude and Longitude 49

feek or affects to feel, that his particular group
is the real vanguard of the army of reform. Of
course, as the particular groups are all marching
in different directions, it is not possible for more
than one of them to be the vanguard. The others,
at best, must be off to one side, and may possibly
be marching the wrong way in the rear; and, as
a matter of fact, it is only occasionally that any
one of them is in the front. There are in each
group many entirely sincere and honest men, and
because of the presence of these men we are too
apt to pay some of their associates the immerited
compliment of speaking of them also as honest
but impracticable. As a matter of fact, the
typical extremist of this kind differs from the
practical reformer, from the public man who
strives in practical fashion for decency, not at all
in superior morality, but in inferior sense. He
is not more virtuous; he is less virtuous. He
is merely more foolish. When Wendell Phillips
denounced Abraham Lincoln as "the slave-hotmd
of Illinois," he did not show himself more vir-
tuous than Lincoln, but more foolish. Neither
did he advance the cause of htiman freedom.
When the contest for the Union and against
slavery took on definite shape, then he and his
kind were swept aside by the statesmen and
soldiers, like Lincoln and Seward, Grant and
Farragut, who alone were able to ride the storm.

50 The Strenuous Life

Great as is the superiority in efficiency of the men
who do things over those who do not, it may be
no greater than their superiority in moraKty. In
addition to the simple and sincere men who have
a twist in their mental make-up, these knots of
enthusiasts contain, especially among their leaders,
men of morbid vanity, who thirst for notoriety,
men who lack power to accomplish anything if
they go in with their fellows to fight for results,
and who prefer to sit outside and attract momen-
tary attention by denouncing those who are really
forces for good.

In every community in our land there are many
htmdreds of earnest and sincere men, clerg5niien
and laymen, reformers who strive for reform in
the field of politics, in the field of philanthropy,
in the field of social life ; and we could count on
the fingers of one hand the number of times these
men have been really aided in their efforts by the
men of the type referred to in the preceding para-
graph. The socialist who raves against the ex-
isting order is not the man who ever lifts his hand
practically to make our social life a little better,
to make the conditions that bear upon the unfor-
ttmate a little easier ; the man who demands the
immediate impossible in temperance is not the
man who ever aids in an effort to minimize the
evils caused by the saloon ; and those who work
practically for poUtical reform are hampered, so

Latitude and Longitude 51

far as they are affected at all, by the strutting
vanity of the professional impracticables.

It is not that these little knots of men accom-
plish much of a positive nature that is objection-
able, for their direct influence is inconsiderable;
but they do have an undoubted indirect effect
for bad, and this of a double kind. They affect
for evil a certain nimiber of decent men in one
way and a certain nimiber of equally decent men
in an entirely different way. Some decent men,
following their lead, withdraw themselves from
the active work of life, whether social, philan-
thropic, or political, and by the amount they
thus withdraw from the side of the forces of good
they strengthen the forces of evil, as, of course,
it makes no difference whether we lessen the
numerator or increase the denominator. Other
decent men are so alienated by such conduct that
in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for
reform, believing reformers to be either hypocrites
or fools. Both of these phenomena are perfectly
familiar to every active politician who has striven
for decency, and to every man who has studied
history in an intelligent way. Few things hurt a
good cause more than the excesses of its nominal
friends.

Fortunately, most extremists lack the power to
commit dangerous excesses. Their action is nor-
mally as abortive as that of the queer abolitionist

52 The Strenuous Life

group who, in 1864, nominated a candidate against
Abraham Lincobi when he was running for re-
election to the Presidency. The men entering
this movement represented all extremes, moral
and mental. Nominally they opposed Lincoln
because they did not feel that he had gone far
enough in what they deemed the right direc-
tion, — ^had not been sufficiently extreme, — and
they objected to what they styled his opportxm-
ism, his tendency to compromise, his temporizing
conduct, and his being a practical politician. In
reality, of course, their opposition to Lincoln was
conditioned, not upon what Lincoln had done,
but upon their own nattunes. They were in-
capable of supporting a great constructive states-
man in a great crisis ; and this, not because they
were too \-irtuous, but because they lacked the
necessary common sense and power of subordina-
tion of self to enable them to work disinterestedly
with others for the common good. Their move-
ment, however, proved utterly abortive, and they
had no effect even for e\-il. The soimd, whole-
some common sense of the American people for-
timately renders such movements, as a rule,
innocuous; and this is, in reality, the prime
reason why republican government prospers in
America, as it does not prosper, for instance, in
France. With us these little knots of impracti-
cables have an insignificant effect upon the

Latitude and Longitude 53

national life, and no representation to speak of
in our governmental assemblies. In France,
where the nation has not the habit of self-gov-
ernment, and where the national spirit is more
volatile and less sane, each little group grows
until it becomes a power for evil, and, taken
together, all the little groups give to French
political life its curious, and by no means elevat-
ing, kaleidoscopic character.

Macaulay's eminently sane and wholesome
spirit and his knowledge of practical affairs give
him a peculiar value among historians of political
thought. In speaking of Scotland at the end of
the seventeenth century he writes as follows :

"It is a remarkable circtunstance that the
same country should have produced in the same
age the most wonderful specimens of both ex-
tremes of human nature. Even in things indif-
ferent the Scotch Puritan would hear of no com-
promise; and he was but too ready to consider
all who recommended prudence and charity as
traitors to the cause of truth. On the other
hand, the Scotchmen of that generation who
made a figure in Parliament were the most dis-
honest and unblushing time-servers that the
world has ever seen. Perhaps it is natural that
the most callous and impudent vice should be
found in the near neighborhood of unreasonable
and impracticable virtue. Where enthusiasts are

54 The Strenuous Life

ready to destroy or be destroyed for trifles mag-
nified into importance by a squeamish conscience,
it is not strange that the very name of conscience
should become a byword of contempt to cool and
shrewd men of business."

What he says of Scotland in the time of Eling
James and King William is true, word for word,
of civic life in New York two centimes later. We
see in New York sodden masses of voters manipu-
lated by clever, unscrupulous, and utterly selfish
masters of machine politics. Against them we
see, it is true, masses of voters who both know
how to, and do, strive for righteousness ; but we
see also very many others in whom the capacity
for self-government seems to have atrophied.
They have lost the power to do practical work by
ceasing to exercise it, by confining themselves to
criticism and theorizing, to intemperate abuse and
intemperate championship of what they but im-
perfectly understand. The analogues of the men
whom Macaulay condenms exist in numbers in
New York, and work evil in oiu* public life for
the very reason that Macaulay gives. They do
not do practical work, and the extreme folly of
their position makes them not infrequently the
allies of scoundrels who cynically practise cor-
ruption. Too often, indeed, they actually alienate
from the cause of decency keen and honest men,
who grow to regard all movements for reform

M'^KF^ ^^^^^H ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H

Latitude and Longitude 55

with contemptuous dislike because of the folly
and vanity of the men who in the name of right-
eousness preach unwisdom and practise unchari-
tableness. These men thus do inestimable dam-
age; for the reform spirit, the spirit of striving
after high ideals, is the breath of life in our
political institutions; and whatever weakens it
by just so much lessens the chance of ultimate
success under democratic government.

Discarding the two extremes, the men who
deliberately work for evil, and the men who are
unwilling or incapable of working for good, there
remains the great mass of men who do desire to
be efficient, who do desire to make this world a
better place to live in, and to do what they can
toward achieving cleaner minds and more whole-
some bodies. To these, after all, we can only
say: Strive manfully for righteousness, and strive
so as to make your efforts for good count. You
are not to be excused if you fail to try to make
things better; and the very phrase "trying to
make things better" implies trying in practical
fashion. One man's capacity is for one kind of
work and another man's capacity for another
Idnd of work. One affects certain methods and
another affects entirely different methods. All
this is of little concern. What is of really vital
importance is that something should be accom-
pli^ed, and that this something should be worthy

56 The Strenuous Life

of accomplishment. The field is of vast size, and
the laborers are always too few. There is not the
slightest excuse for one sincere worker looking
down upon another because he chooses a different
part of the field and different implements. It is
inexcusable to refuse to work, to work slacldy or
perversely, or to mar the work of others.

No man is justified in doing evil on the grotmd
of expediency. He is boimd to do all the good
possible. Yet he must consider the question of
expediency, in order that he may do all the good
possible, for otherwise he will do none. As soon
as a politician gets to the point of thinking that
in order to be "practical" he has got to be base,
he has become a noxious member of the body
politic. That species of practicability eats into
the moral sense of the people like a cancer, and
he who practises it can no more be excused than
an editor who debauches public decency in order
to sell his paper.

We need the worker in the fields of social and
civic reform; the man who is keenly interested
in some imiversity settlement, some civic club or
citizens* association which is striving to elevate
the standard of life. We need clean, healthy
newspapers, with clean, healthy criticism which
shall be fearless and truthful. We need upright
politicians, who will take the time and trouble,
and who possess the capacity, to manage caucuses,

Latitude and Longitude 57

conventions, and public assemblies. We need
men who try to be their poorer brothers' keepers
to the extent of befriending them and working
with them so far as they are willing; men who
work in charitable associations, or, what is even
better, strive to get into touch with the wage-
workers, to understand them, and to champion
their cause when it is just. We need the sound
and healthy idealist; the theoretic writer,
preacher, or teacher; the Emerson or Phillips
Brooks, who helps to create the atmosphere of
enthusiasm and practical endeavor. In public
life we need not only men who are able to work
in and through their parties, but also upright,
fearless, rational independents, who will deal im-
partial justice to all men and all parties. We
need men who are far-sighted and resolute ; men
who combine sincerity with sanity. We need
scholarly men, too — ^men who study all the diffi-
cult questions of our poUtical life from the stand-
point both of practice and of theory; men who
thus study trusts, or mimicipal government, or
finance, or taxation, or civil-service reform, as
the authors of the **FederaUst" studied the
problems of federal government.

In closing, let me again dwell upon the point
I am seeking to emphasize, so that there shall
be no chance of honest mistmderstanding of what
I say. It is vital that every man who is in

ss The Strenuous Life

politics, as a man ought to be, with a disin-
terested piirpose to serve the public, should strive
steadily for reform; that he shotild have the
highest ideals. He must lead, only he must lead
in the right direction, and normally he must be
in sight of his followers. Cynicism in public life
is a curse, and when a man has lost the power of
enthusiasm for righteousness it will be better for
him and the country if he abandons public
life.

Above all, the political reformer must not
permit himself to be driven from his duty of
supporting what is right by any irritation at the
men who, while nominally supporting the same
objects, and even ridiculing him as a backslider
or an "opportunist," yet by their levity or
fanaticism do damage to the cause which he
really serves, and which they profess to serve.
Let him disregard them; for though they are,
according to their ability, the foes of decent
politics, yet, after all, they are but weaklings,
and the real and dangerous enemies of the cause
he holds dear are those sinister beings who batten
on the evil of our political system, and both
profit by its existence, and by their own existence
tend to perpetuate and increase it. We must not
be diverted from our warfare with these powerful
and efficient corruptionists by irritation at the
vain prattlers who think they are at the head of

Latitude and Longitude 59

the reform forces, whereas they are really wander-
ing in bypaths in the rear.

The professional impracticable, the man who
sneers at the sane and honest strivers after good,
who sneers at the men who are following, how-
ever humbly, in the footsteps of those who
worked for and secured practical restilts in the
days of Washington, and again in the days of
Lincoln, who denounces them as time-servers and
compromisers, is, of course, an ally of corruption.
But, after all, he can generally be disregarded,
whereas the real and dangerous foe is the corrupt
politician, whom we cannot afford to disregard.
When one of these professional impracticables
denounces the attitude of decent men as "a
hodge-podge of the ideal and the practicable,"
he is amusingly tmaware that he is writing his
own condemnation, showing his own inability to
do good work or to appreciate good work. The
Constitutional Convention over which Washington
presided, and which made us a nation, represented
precisely and exactly this ''hodge-podge," and
was frantically denotmced in its day by the men
of the impracticable type. Lincoln's career
throughout the Civil War was such a "hodge-
podge," and was in its turn denounced in exactly
the same way. Lincoln disregarded the jibes of
these men, who did their puny best to hurt the
great cause for which he battled ; and they never.

6o The Strenuous Life

by their pin-pricks, succeeded in diverting him
from the real foe. The fanatical antislavery
people wished to hurry him into imwise, extreme,
and premature action, and denounced him as
compromising with the forces of e\41, as being a
practical politician — which he was, if practicality
is held to include wisdom and high purpose. He
did not permit himself to be affected by their
position. He did not yield to what they advised
when it was impracticable, nor did he permit
himself to become prejudiced against so much
of what they championed as was right and prac-
ticable. His ideal was just as high as theirs.
He did not lower it. He did not lose his temper
at their conduct, or cease to strive for the abolition
of slavery and the restoration of the Union ; and
whereas their conduct foreboded disaster to both
causes, his efforts secured the success of both.
So, in our turn, we of to-day are bound to try to
tread in the footsteps of those great Americans
who in the past have held a high ideal and have
striven mightily through practical methods to
realize that ideal. There must be many compro-
mises; but we cannot compromise with dis-
honesty, with sin. We must not be misled at
any time by the cheap assertion that people get
only what they 'w-ant; that the editor of a de-
graded newspaper is to be excused because the
public want the degradation ; that the city officials

Latitude and Longitude 6i

who inaugurate a ** wide-open" policy are to be
excused because a portion of the pubUc likes vice;
that the men who jeer at philanthropy are to be
excused because among philanthropists there are
hypocrites, and among imfortimates there are
vicious and unworthy people. To pander to
depravity inevitably means to increase the de-
pravity. It is a dreadful thing that public senti-
ment shotild condone misconduct in a public man ;
but this is no excuse for the public man, if by his
conduct he still further degrades pubhc sentiment.
There can be no meddling with the laws of
righteousness, of decency, of morality. We are
in honor bound to put into practice what we
preach; to remember that we are not to be
excused if we do not ; and that in the last resort
no material prosperity, no business acimien, no
intellectual development of any kind, can atone
in the life of a nation for the lack of the funda-
mental qualities of courage, honesty, and common
sense.

FELLOW-FEELING AS A POLIT-
ICAL FACTOR

Published in ^hs " Cxntury," Januart, 190*

CHAPTER IV.

PELLOW-PEELING AS A POLITICAL PACTOR.

FELLOW-FEELING, sympathy in the broad-
est sense> is the most important factor in
producing a healthy political and social life.
Neither our national nor our local civic life can be
what it should be imless it is marked by the fellow-
feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect,
the sense of common duties and common interests,
which arise when men take the trouble to tmder-
stand one another, and to associate together for a
common object. A very large share of the rancor
of political and social strife arises either from sheer
misimderstanding by one section, or by one class,
of another, or else from the fact that the two sec-
tions, or two classes, are so cut off from each other ^,
that neither appreciates the other's passions, prej- j
udices, and, indeed, point of view, while they are \
both entirely ignorant of their community of feel-
ing as regards the essentials of manhood and -J
htimanity.

This is one reason why the public school is so
admirable an institution. To it more than to any
other among the many causes which, in our Amer-
ican life, tell for religious toleration is due the im-
possibility of persecution of a particular creed.
5 65

66 The Strenuous Life

When in their earliest and most impressionable
years Protestants, Catholics, and Jews go to the
same schools, leam the same lessons, play the same
games, and are forced, in the rough-and-ready
democracy of boy life, to take each at his true
worth, it is impossible later to make the disciples
of one creed persecute those of another. From the
evils of religious persecution America is safe.

From the evils of sectional hostiUty we are, at
any rate, far safer than we were. The war with
Spain was the most absolutely righteous foreign
war in which any nation has engaged during the
nineteenth centiuy, and not the least of its many
good features was the unity it brought about
between the sons of the men who wore the blue
and of those who wore the gray. This neces-
sarily meant the dying out of the old antipathy.
Of course embers smolder here and there ; but the
P country at large is growing more and more to take
pride in the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to
an ideal, displayed alike by the soldiers of both
sides in the Civil War. We are all united now.
We are all glad that the Union was restored, and
are one in our loyalty to it ; and hand in hand with
this general recognition of the all-importance of
preserving the Union has gone the recognition of
the fact that at the outbreak of the Civil War men
could not cut loose from the ingrained habits and
traditions of generations, and that the man from

A Political Factor 67

the North and the man from the South each was
loyal to his highest ideal of duty when he drew
sword or shouldered rifle to fight to the death for
what he believed to be right.

Nor is it only the North and the South that have
struck hands. The East and the West are funda-
mentally closer together than ever before. Using
the word ** West '* in the old sense, as meaning the
country west of the Alleghanies, it is of course per-
fectly obviotis that it is the West which will shape
the destinies of this nation. The great group of
wealthy and powerful States about the Upper Mis-
sissippi, the Ohio, the Missotui, and their tribu-
taries, will have far more weight than any other
section in deciding the fate of the republic in the
centuries that are opening. This is not in the
least to be regretted by the East, for the simple
and excellent reason that the interests of the West
and the East are one. The West will shape otu*
destinies because she will have more people and a
greater territory, and because the whole develop-
ment of the western cotmtry is such as to make it
peculiarly the exponent of all that is most vigor-
ously and characteristically American in our
national life.

So it is with the Pacific slope, and the giant young
States that are there growing by leaps and bounds.
The greater the share they have in directing the
national life, the better it will be for all of us.

68 The Strenuous Life

I do not for a moment mean that mistakes will
not be committed in every section of the country ;
they certainly will be, and in whatever section
they are conmiitted it will be otir duty to protest
against them, and to try to overthrow those who
are responsible for them: but I do mean to say
that in the long run each section is going to find
that its welfare, instead of being antagonistic to,
is indissolubly bound up in, the welfare of other
sections ; and the growth of means of communica-
tion, the growth of education in its highest and
finest sense, means the growth in the sense of
solidarity throughout the country, in the feeling
of patriotic pride of each American in the deeds of
all other Americans — of pride in the past history
and present and f utiu^ greatness of the whole
country.

Nobody is interested in the fact that Dewey
comes from Vermont, Hobson from Alabama, or
Funston from Kansas. If all three came from the
same county it would make no difference to us.
. They are Americans, and every American has an
equal right to challenge his share of glory in their
deeds. As we read of the famous feats of our
army in the Philippines, it matters nothing to us
whether the regiments come from Oregon, Idaho,
California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, or Tennessee.
What does matter is that these splendid soldiers
are all Americans ; that they are our heroes ; that

A Political Factor 69

our blood runs in their veins ; that the flag under 1
which we live is the flag for which they have /
fought, for which some of them have died. J

Danger from rehgious antipathy is dead, and
from sectional antipathy dying; but there are at
times very ugly manifestations of antipathy be-
tween class and class. It seems a pity to have to
use the word "class," because there are really no
classes in our American life in the sense in which
the^word "class" is used in Europe. Our social
and political systems do not admit of them in
theory, and in practice they exist only in a very
fluid state. In most European cotmtries classes
are separated by rigid boundaries, which can be
crossed but rardy, and with the utmost difficulty
and peril. Here the boundaries cannot properiy
be said to exist, and are certainly so fluctuating
and evasive, so indistinctly marked, that they can-
not be appreciated when seen near by. Any
American family which lasts a few generations
will be apt to have representatives in all the dif- .
ferent classes. The great business men, even the
great professional men, and especially the great
statesmen and sailors and soldiers, are very apt
to spring from among the farmers or wage-work-
ers, and their kinsfolk remain near the old home
or at the old trade. If ever there existed in the
world a community where the identity of interest,
of habit, of principle, and of ideals should be felt

70 The Strenuous Life

as a living force, ours is the one. Speaking gen-
erally, it really is felt to a degree quite tmknown
in other countries of our size. There are, doubt-
less, portions of Norway and Switzerland where
the social and political ideals, and their nearness
to realization, are not materially diflEerent from
those of the most essentially American portions
of our own land ; but this is not true of any Euro-
pean country of considerable size. It is only in
American communities that we see the farmer, the
hired man, the lawyer, and the merchant, and
possibly even the officer of the army or the navy,
all kinsmen, and all accepting their relations as
perfectly nattua.1 and simple. This is eminently
healthy. This is just as it should be in our repub-
lic. It represents the ideal toward which it would
be a good thing to approximate ever3rwhere. In
the great industrial centers, with their highly com-
plex, highly specialized conditions, it is of course
merely an ideal. There are parts even of our
oldest States, as, for example, New York, where
this ideal is actually realized; there are other
parts, particularly the great cities, where the life
is so wholly different that the attempt to live up
precisely to the country conditions would be arti-
ficial and impossible. Nevertheless, the fact re-
Tmains that the only true solution of our political
I and social problems lies in ctdtivating everywhere
\ihe spirit of brotherhood, of fellow-feeling and

A Political Factor 71

understanding between man and man, and the
willingness to treat a man as a man, which are the
essential factors in American democracy as we still
see it in the country districts.

The chief factor in producing such sympathy is
simply association on a plane of equality, and for
a common object. Any^ Jiealthy-mindedpAinerican
is bound to think weltljfiiis'Tellow^Americans if
he only gets to know them. The trouble is that
he does not know them. If the banker and the
farmer never meet, or meet only in the most per-
functory business way, if the banking is not done
by men whom the farmer knows as his friends and
associates, a spirit of mistrust is almost sure to
spring up. If the merchant or the manufacturer,
the lawyer or the clerk, never meets the mechanic
or the handicraftsman, save on rare occasions,
when the meeting may be of a hostile kind, each
side feels that the other is alien and naturally
antagonistic. But if any one individual of any
group were to be thrown into natural association
with another group, the diffictdties wotdd be found
to disappear so far as he was concerned. Very
possibly he wotdd become the ardent champion
of the other group.

Perhaps I may be pardoned for quoting my own
experience as an instance in point. Outside of
college boys and politicians my first intimate asso-
ciates were ranchmen, cow-punchers, and game-

72 The Strenuous Life

hunters, and I speedily became convinced that
there were no other men in the country who were
their equals. Then I was thrown much with farm-
ers, and I made up my mind that it was the farmer
upon whom the fotmdations of the commonwealth
really rested — that the farmer was the archetypical
good American. Then I saw a good deal of rail-
road men, and after quite an intimate acquaint-
ance with them I grew to feel that, especially in
their higher ranks, they typified the very qualities
of courage, self-reliance, self-command, hardihood,
capacity for work, power of initiative, and power
of obedience, which we like most to associate with
the American name. Then I happened to have
dealings with certain carpenters' imions, and grew
to have a great respect for the carpenter, for the
mechanic type. By this time it dawned upon me
that they were all pretty good fellows, and that
my championship of each set in succession above
all other sets ha,d sprung largely from the fact that
I was very familiar with the set I championed, and
less familiar with the remainder. In other words,
I had grown into sympathy with, into tmderstand-
ing of, group after group, with the effect that I
invariably found that they and I had common pur-
poses and a common standpoint. We differed
among ourselves, or agreed among ourselves, not
because we had different occupations or the same
occupation, but because of our ways of looking at

A Political Factor n

life. It is this capacity for sympathy, for fellow- "
feeling and mutual understanding, which must lie
at the basis of all really successful movements f or^
good government and the betterment of social and
civic conditions. There is no patent device for
bringing about good government. Still less is
there any patent device for remedying social evils
and doing away with social inequalities. Wise
legislation can help in each case, and crude, vicious,
or demagogic legislation can do an infinity of harm.
But the betterment must come through the slow
workings of the same forces which always have
tended for righteousness, and always will.

The prime lesson to be taught is the lesson of
treating each man on his worth as a man, and of
remembering that while sometimes it is necessary,
from both a legislative and social standpoint, to
consider men as a class, yet in the long run our
safety lies in recognizing the individual's worth or
lack of worth as the chief basis of action, and in
shaping our whole^Cbiidiict, and especially our
political conduct, accordingly. It is impossible
for a democracy to endure if the political lines are
drawn to coincide with class lines. The resulting
government, whether of the upper or the lower
class, is not a government of the whole people, but
a government of part of the people at the expense
of the rest. Where the lines of political division
are vertical, the men of each occupation and of

74 The Strenuous Life

every social standing separating according to their
vocations and principles, the result is healthy and
normal. Just so far, however, as the lines are
drawn horizontally, the result is unhealthy, and
in the long run disastrous, for such a division
means that men are pitted against one another
in accordance with the blind and selfish interests
of the moment. Each is thus placed over against
his neighbor in an attitude of greedy class hos-
tility, which becomes the mainspring of his con-
duct, instead of each basing his political action
upon his own convictions as to what is advisable,
and what inadvisable, and upon his own disin-
terested sense of devotion to the interests of the
whole commtmity as he sees them. Republics
have fallen in the past primarily because the
parties that controlled them divided along the
lines of class, so that inevitably the triumph of
one or the other implied the supremacy of a part
over the whole. The result might be an oligarchy,
or it might be mob rule ; it mattered little which,
as regards the ultimate effect, for in both cases
tjnranny and anarchy were sure to alternate. The
failure of the Greek and Italian republics was
fundamentally due to this cause. Switzerland has
flourished because the divisions upon which her
political issues have been fought have not been
primarily those of mere caste or social class, and
America will flourish and will become greater than

A Political Factor 75

any empire because, in the long run, in this coun-
try, any party which strives to found itself upon
sectional or class jealousy and hostility must go
down before the good sense of the people.

The only way to provide against the evils of a
horizontal cleavage in politics is to encourage the
growth of fellow-feeling, of a feeling based on the V
relations of man to man, and not of class to class. /^
In the country districts this is not very difficult.
In the neighborhood where I live, on the Fourth of
July the four Protestant ministers and the Catholic
priest speak from the same platform, the children
of all of tis go to the same district school, and the
landowner and the hired man take the same views,
not merely of politics, but of duck-shooting and of
/i ntern ational yacht races. Naturally in such a
community there is small chance for class division.
There is a slight feeling against the mere stunmer
residents, precisely because there is not much sym-
pathy with them, and because they do not share in
our local interests ; but otherwise there are enough
objects in common to put all much on the same
plane of interest in various important particulars,
and each man has too much self-respect to feel
particularly jealous of any other man. Moreover,
as the community is small and consists for the
most part of persons who have dwelt long in the
land, while those of foreign ancestry, instead of
keeping by themselves, have intermarried with the

l-^^"^

76 The Strenuous Life

natives, there is still a realizing sense of kinship
among the men who follow the different occupa-
tions. The characteristic family names are often
borne by men of widely different fortunes, ranging
from the local bayman through the captain of the
oyster-sloop, the sailmaker, or the wheelwright, to
the owner of what the countryside may know as
the manor-house — ^which probably contains one of
the innumerable rooms in which Washington is
said to have slept. We have sharp rivalries, and
our politics are by no means always what they
y should be, but at least we do not divide on class
P / lines, for the very good reason that there has been
\^ no crystallization into classes.

This condition prevails in essentials throughout
the country districts of New York, which are polit-
ically very much the healthiest districts. Any
man who has served in the legislature realizes that
the country members form, on the whole, a very
sound and healthy body of legislators. Any man
who has gone about much to the county fairs in
New York — almost the only place where the farm
folks gather in large numbers — cannot but have
been struck by the high character of the average
cotmtryman. He is a fine fellow, rugged, hard-
working, shrewd, and keenly alive to the funda-
mental virtues. He and his brethren of the
smaller towns and villages, in ordinary circum-
stances, take very little accotmt, indeed, of any

A Political Factor 77

caste difference ; they greet each man strictly on
his merits as a man, and therefore form a commu-
nity in which there is singularly little caste spirit,
and in which men associate on a thoroughly
healthy and American groimd of common ideals,
common convictions, and common sympathies.

Unforttmately, this cannot be said of the larger
cities, where the conditions of life are so compli-
cated that there has been an extreme differentia-
tion and specialization in every species of occupa-
tion, whether of business or pleasure. The people
of a certain degree of wealth and of a certain occu-
pation may never come into any real contact with
the people of another occupation, of another social
standing. The tendency is for the relations always
to be between class and class instead of between
individual and individual. This produces the
thoroughly unhealthy belief that it is for the
interest of one class as against another to have its
class representatives dominant in public life. The
ills of any such system are obvious. As a matter
of fact, the enormous mass of our legislation and
administration ought to be concerned with matters
that are strictly for the commonweal ; and where
special legislation or administration is needed, as
it often must be, for a certain class, the need can
be met primarily by mere honesty and common
sense. But if men are elected solely from any
caste, or on any caste theory, the voter gradually

7S The Strenuous Life

'^substitutes the theory of allegiance to the caste
for the theory of allegiance to the commonwealth

^as a whole, and instead of demanding as funda-
mental the qualities of probity and broad intelli-
gence — which are the indispensable qualities in
securing the welfare of the whole — as the first
consideration, he demands, as a substitute, zeal
in the service, or apparent service, of the class,
which is quite compatible with gross corruption
outside. In short, we get back to the conditions
which foredoomed democracy to failure in the
ancient Greek and medieval republics, where party
lines were horizontal and class warred against class,
each in consequence necessarily substituting devo-
tion to the interest of a class for devotion to the
interest of the state and to the elementary ideas of
morality.

The only way to avoid the growth of these evils
is, so far as may be, to help in the creation of con-
ditions which will permit mutual understancffilg
and fellow-feeling between the members of d Ser-
ent classes. To do this it is absolutely necessary
that there should be natural association between
the members for a common end ofwilh a common
pxirpose. As long as men are separated by their
caste lines, each body having its own amusements,
interests, and occupations, they are certain to
regard one another with that instinctive distrust
which they fed for foreigners. There are excep-

A Political Factor

tions to the rule, but it is a rule. The average man,
when he has no means of being brought into con-
tact with another, or of gaining any insight into-
that other's ideas and aspirations, either ignores
these ideas and aspirations completely, or else feels
toward them a more or less tepid dislike. The re-
sult is a complete and perhaps fatal misunder-
standing, due primarily to the fact that the
capacity for fellow-feeling is given no opportunity
to flotirish. On the other hand, if the men can be
mixed together in some way that will loosen the
class or caste bonds and put each on his merits as
an1S3ividual man, there is certain to be a regroup-
ing^dependent of caste lines. A tie may remain
between the members of a caste, based merely
upon the similarity of their habits of life ; but this
will be much less strong than the ties based on '
identity of passion, of principle, or of ways~6f Took-
iilg at life. Any man who has ever, for his good
fortune, been obliged to work with men in masses,
in some place or under some condition or in some
association where the dislocation of caste was com-
plete, must recognize the truth of this as apparent.

< Every mining camp, every successful volunteer
regiment, proves it. In such cases there is always
some object which must be attained, and the men
interested in its attainment have to develop their
own leaders and their own ties of association, while
the would-be leader can succeed only by selecting

to The Strenuous Life

for assistants the men whose pectdiar capacities fit
them to do the best work in the various emergen-
cies that arise. Under such circumstances the
men who work together for the achievement of a
common result in which they are intensely inter-
ested are very soon certain to disregard, and,
indeed, to forget, the creed or race origin or ante-
cedent social standing or class occupation of the
man who is either their friend or then- foe. They
get down to the naked bed-rock of character and
capacity.

This is to a large extent true of the party organ-
izations in a great city, and, indeed, of all serious
political organizations. If they are to be success-
ful they must necessarily be democratic, in the
sense that each man is treated strictly on his
merits as a man. No one can succeed who at-
tempts to go in on any other basis ; above all, no
one can succeed if he goes in feeling that, instead
of merely doing his duty, he is conferring a favor
upon the community, and is therefore warranted
in adopting an attitude of condescension toward
J his fellows. It is often quite as irritating to be
* patronized as to be plundered ; as reformers have
more than once discovered when the mass of the
voters stolidly voted against them, and in favor
of a gang of familiar scoundrels, chiefly because
they had no sense of fellow-feeling with their
would-be benefactors.

A Political Factor sx

The tendency to patronize is certain to be eradi-
cated as soon as any man goes into politics in a
practical and not in a dilettante fashion. He
speedily finds that the quality of successful man-
agement, the power to handle men and secure
results, may exist in seemingly unlikely persons.
If he intends to carry a caucus or primary, or elect
a given candidate, or secure a certain piece of legis-
lation or administration, he will have to find out
and work with innumerable allies, and make use
of innumerable subordinates. Given that he and
they have a common object, the one test that he
must apply to them is as to their ability to help in
achieving that object. The result is that in a very
short time the men whose purposes are the same
forget about all differences, save in capacity to
carry out the purpose. The banker who is in-
terested in seeing a certain nomination made or
a certain election carried forgets everything but
his community of fnterest \^th the retail butcher
wliO"i?*a"teader along his section of the avenue, or
the starter who can control a considerable number
of the motormen ; and in return the butcher and
the starter accept the banker quite naturally as
an ally whom they may follow or lead, as circum-
stances dictate. In other words, all three grow
to fed in common on certain important subjects,
and this fellow-feeling has results as far-reaching
as they are healthy.
6

8a The Strenuous Life

Good thus follows from mere ordinary poKtical
afl&liation. A man who has taken an active part
in the political life of a great city possesses an
incalculable advantage over his fellow-citizens who
have not so taken part, because normally he has
more tmderstanding than they can possibly have
of the attitude of mind, the passions, prejudices,
hopes, and animosities of his fellow-citizens, with
whom he would not ordinarily be brought into
business or social contact. Of course there are
plenty of exceptions to this rule. A man who is
drawn into politics from absolutely selfish reasons,
and especially a rich man who merely desires to
buy political promotion, may know absolutely
nothing that is of value as to any but the basest
side of the human nature with which his sphere of
contact has been enlarged ; and, on the other hand,
a wise employer of labor, or a philanthropist in
whom zeal and judgment balance each other, may
know far more than most politicians. But the fact
remains that the e ffect of po litical life, and of the
^-f associations that it brings, is of very great benefit
?' in produciag a better understanding and a keener

fellow-feeling among men who otherwise would
know one another not at all, or else as members
of alien bodies or classes.

This being the case, how much more is it true if
the same habit of association for a common pur-
pose can be applied where the purpose is really of

A Political Factor 83

the highest ! Much is accomplished in this way by
the tiniversity settlements and similar associations.
Wherever these associations are entered into in a
healthy and sane spirit, the good they do is incal-
culable, from the simple fact that they bring
together in pursuit of a worthy common object
men of excellent character, who would never other-
wise meet. It is of just as much importance to the
one as to the other that the man from Hester
Street or the Bowery or Avenue B, and the man
from the Riverside Drive or Fifth Avenue, should
have some meeting-ground where they can grow
to understand one another as an incident of work-
ing for a common end. Of course if, on the one
hand, the work is entered into in a patronizing
spirit, no good will result ; and, on the other hand,
if the zealous enthusiast loses his sanity, only
harm will follow. There is much dreadful misery ^
in a great city, and a high-spirited, generous young
man, when first brought into contact with it, has
his syx]:^>athies,scL excited that he is very apt to
become a socialist, or turn to the advocacy of any
wild scheme, courting a plunge from bad to worse,
exactly as do too many of the leaders of the discon-
tent arotmd him. His sanity and cool-headedness
will be thoroughly tried, and if he loses them his
power for good will vanish.

But this is merely to state one form of a general
truth. If a man permits largeness of heart to

84 The Strenuous Life

degenerate into softness of head, he inevitably
beCbines'a ntdsance in any relation of life. J[f
sympathy becomes distorted and morbid, it
hampers instead xrf help i ng the~ effoix toward
social betterment. Yet without sympathy, with-
out fellow-feeling, no permanent good can be
accomplished. In any healthy community there
must be a soUdarity of sentiment and a knowledge
of solidarity of interest among 'tEe~diSefettl flieni-
bei§: Where this'Sblldarity ceases to exist, where
there is no fellow-feeling, the community is ripe
for disaster. Of course the fellow-feeling may be
of value much ifTpropbrtion as it is unco nscious .
A sentiment that is easy and natural is far better
than one which has to be artificially stimulated .
But the artificial stimulus is better than norieraSd
with fellow-feeling, as with all other emoticSs,
what is started artificially may become quite"
natural in its continuance. With most men
^courage is largely an acquired habit, and on the
first occasions when it is called for it necessitates
the exercise of will-power and self-control; but
by exercise it gradually becomes almost automatic.
So it is with fellow-feeling. A maSTwhcTcon-
scientiously endeavors to throw in his lot with
rv^'' . ..J those about him, to make his interests theirs, to

^ .-. ' -^ put himself in a position where he and they have

a common object, will at first feel a little sdf -con-
scious, will realize too plainly his own aims. But

A Political Factor

with exercise this will pass off. He will speedily
find that the fellow-feeling which at first he had to
stimulate was really existent, though latent, and
is capable of a very healthy growth. It can, of
course, become normal only when the man him-
self becomes genuinely interested in the^j^t^
which he and his fellows are striving to attain. " Tt
is therefore obviously desirable that this object
should possess a real and vital interest for every
one. Such is the case with a proper political asso-
ciation.

Much has been done, not merely by the ordinary
political associations, but by the city clubs, civic
federations, and the like, and very much more can
be done. Of course there is danger of any such
association being perverted either by knavery or
folly. When a partisan political organization
becomes merely an association for purposes of
plunder and patronage, it may be a menace in-
stead of a help to a community ; and when a non-
partisan political organization falls under the
control of the fantastic extremists always at-
tracted to such movements, in its turn it becomes
either useless or noxious. But if these organiza-
tions, partisan or non-partisan, are conducted
along the lines of sanity and honesty, they produce
a good more far-reaching than their promoters
suppose, and achieve results of greater import-
ance than those immediately aimed at.

86 The Strenuous Life

It is an excellent thing to win a triumph for
good government at a given election ; but it is a
far better thing gradually to build up that spirit
of fellow-feeling among American citizens, which,
in the long run, is absolutely necessary if we are
to see the principles of virile honesty and robust
common sense triumph in our civic life.

CIVIC HELPFULNESS

Published in thb "Cbntury/' Octobbr, 1900

CHAPTER V.

CIVIC HELPFULNESS.

IN Mr. Lecky's profoundly suggestive book,
"The Map of Life," referred to by me in a
former article, he emphasizes the change that
has been gradually coming over the religioiis atti-
tude of the world because of the growing impor-
tance laid upon conduct as compared with dogma.
In this cotmtry we are long past the stage of
regarding it as any part of the state's duty to
enforce a particular religious dogma; and more
and more the professors of the different creeds
themselves are beginning tacitly to acknowledge
that the prime worth of a creed is to be gaged by
the standard of conduct it exacts among its fol-
lowers toward their fellows. The creed which
each man in his heart believes to be essential to
his own salvation is for him alone to determine;
but we have a right to pass judgment upon his
actions toward those about him.

Tried by this standard, the religious teachers
of the commtmity stand most honorably high. It
is probable that no other class of our citizens do
anything like the amotmt of disinterested labor
for their fellow-men. To those who are associated
with them at close quarters this statement will

90 The Strenuous Life

seem so obviotisly a truism as to rank among the
platitudes. But there is a far from inconsiderable
body of public opinion which, to judge by the
speeches, writings, and jests in which it delights,
has no conception of this state of things. If such
people would but take the trouble to follow out
the actual life of a hard-worked clergyman or
priest, I think they would become a little ashamed
of the tone of flippancy they are so prone to adopt
when speaking about them.

In the cotmtry districts the minister of the gos-
pel is normally the associate and leader of his con-
gregation and in close personal touch with them.
He shares in and partially directs their intellectual
and moral life, and is responsive to their spiritual
needs. If they are prosperous, he is prosperotis.
If the community be poor and hard-working, he
shares the poverty and works as hard as any one.
As fine a figure as I can call to mind is that of one
such country clergyman in a poor farming com-
munity not far from the capital of the State of
New York — a vigorous old man, who works on his
farm six days in the week, and on the seventh
preaches what he himself has been practising. The
farm work does not occupy all of the week-days, for
there is not a spiritual need of his parishioners that
he neglects. He visits them, looks after them if
they are sick, baptizes the children, comforts those
in sorrow, and is ready with shrewd advice for

Civic Helpfulness 91

those who need aid ; in short, shows himself from
week's end to week's end a thoroughly sincere,
earnest, hard-working old Christian. ITiis is per-
haps the healthiest type. It is in keeping with the
surroundings, for in the cotintry districts the
quality of self-help is very highly developed, and
there is little use for the great organized charities.
Neighbors know one another. The poorest and
the richest are more or less in touch, and chari-
table feelings find a nattual and simple expression
in the homely methods of performing charitable
duties. This does not mean that there is not
room for an immense amotmt of work in cotmtry
communities and in villages and small towns.
Every now and then, in traveling over the State,
one comes upon a public library, a Yotmg Men's
Qiristian Association building, or some similar
structure which has been put up by a man bom
in the place, who has made his money elsewhere,
and feels he would like to have some memorial in
his old home. Such a gift is of far-reaching bene-
fit. Almost better is what is done in the way of
circulating libraries and the like by the united
action of those men and women who appreciate
clearly the intellectual needs of the people who
live far from the great centers of our rather fever-
ish modem civilization; for in cotmtry life it is
necessary to guard not against mental fever, but
against lack of mental stimultis and interests.

9^ The Strenuous Life

In cities the conditions are very different, both
as regards the needs and as regards the way it is
possible to meet these needs. There is much less
feeling of essential commtinity of interest, and
poverty of the body is lamentably visible among
great masses. There are districts populated to
the point of congestion, where hardly any one is
above the level of poverty, though this poverty
does not by any means always imply misery.
Where it does mean misery it mtist be met by
organization, and, above all, by the disinterested,
endless labor of those who, by choice, and to do
good, live in the midst of it, temporarily or perma-
nently. Very many men and women spend part
of their lives or do part of their life-work tinder
such circumstances, and conspicuotis among them
are clergymen and priests.

Only those who have seen something of such
work at close quarters realize how much of it goes
on quietly and without the slightest outside show,
and how much it represents to many lives that else
would be passed in gray squalor. It is not neces-
sary to give the names of the living, or I could
enumerate among my personal acquaintance fifty
clergymen and priests, men of every church, of
every degree of wealth, each of whom cheerfully
and quietly, year in and year out, does his share,
and more than his share, of the imending work
which he feels is imposed upon him alike by Chris-

Civic Helpfulness 93

tianity and by that form of applied Christianity
which we call good citizenship. Par more than
that number of women, in and out of religious
bodies, who do to the full as much work, could be
mentioned. Of course, for every one thtis men-
tioned there would be a htindred, or many htm-
dreds, tmmentioned. Perhaps there is no harm
in alluding to one man who is dead. Very early in
my career as a police commissioner of the city of
New York I was brought in contact with Father
Casserly of the Paulist Pathers. After he had
made up his mind that I was really trying to get
things decent in the department, and to see that
law and order prevailed, and that crime and vice
were warred against in practical fashion, he
became very intimate with me, helping me in
every way, and tmconsciously giviag me an in-
sight into his own work and his own character.
Continually, in one way and another, I came
across what Pather Casserly was doing, always in
the way of showing the intense human sympathy
and interest he was taking in the lives about him.
If one of the boys of a family was wild, it was
Father Casserly who planned methods of steady-
ing him. If, on the other hand, a steady boy met
with some misfortune, — ^lost his place, or some-
thing of the kind, — it was Father Casserly who
went and stated the facts to the employer. The
Patdist Pathers had always been among the most

94 The Strenuous Life

efficient foes of the abiises of the liquor traflSc.
They never hesitated to interfere with saloons,
dance-houses, and the like. One secret of their
influence with otu* Police Board was that, as they
continually went about among their people and
knew them all, and as they were entirely disin-
terested, they could be trusted to tell who did
right and who did wrong among the instruments
of the law. One of the perplexing matters in
dealing with policemen is that, as they are always
in hostile contact with criminals and would-be
criminals, who are sure to lie about them, it is
next to impossible to tell when accusations against
them are false and when they are true; for the
good man who does his duty is certain to have
scotmdrelly foes, and the bad man who black-
mails these same scotmdrels usually has nothing
but the same evidence against him. But Father
Casseriy and the rest of his order knew the police-
men personally, and we f oimd we could trust them
implicitly to tell exactly who was good and who
was not. Whether the man were Protestant,
Catholic, or Jew, if he was a faithftil public ser-
vant they would so report him; and if he was
unfaithftU he would be reported as such wholly
without regard to his creed. We had this experi-
ence with an honorably large number of priests
and clergymen. Once in the same batch of pro-
motions from sergeant to captain there was a

Civic Helpfulness 95

Protestant to whom our attention had been drawn
by the earnest praise of Fathers Casserly and
Doyle, and a Catholic who had first been brought
to our notice by the advocacy of Bishop Potter.

There were other ways in which clergymen
helped our Police Board. We wanted at one time
to get plenty of strong, honest yotmg men for the
police force, and did not want to draw them from
among the ordinary types of ward heeler. Two
fertile recruiting-grotmds proved to be, one a
Catholic church and the other a Methodist church.
The rector of the former, Dr. Wall, had a temper-
ance lycetim for the yotmg men of his parish ; the
pastor of the latter had a congregation made out
of a bit of old native America suddenly overlapped
by the growth of the city, and his wheelwrights,
ship-carpenters, baymen, and coasting-sailors gave
us the same good type of officer that we got from
among the mechanics, motormen, and blacksmiths
who came from Dr. Wall's lyceum. Among our
other close friends was another Methodist preacher,
who had once been a reporter, but who had felt
stirred by an irresistible impulse to leave his pro-
fession and devote his life to the East Side, where
he ministered to the wants of those who would not
go to the fashionable churches, and for whom no
Other church was especially prepared. In con-
nection with his work, one of the things that was
especially pleasing was tlie way in which he had

96 The Strenuous Life

gone in not only with the rest of the Protestant
clergy and the non-sectarian philanthropic work-
ers of the district, but with the Catholic clergy,
joining hands in the fight against the seething evils
of the slum. One of his Catholic allies, by the
way, a certain Brother A , was doing an im-
mense amotmt for the Italian children of his parish.
He had a large parochial school, originally attended
by the children of Irish parents. Gradually the
Irish had moved uptown, and had been supplanted
by the Italians. It was his life-work to lift these
little Italians over the first painful steps on the
road toward American citizenship.

Again, let me call to mind an institution, not in
New York, but in Albany, where the sisters of a
religious organization devote their entire lives to
helping girls who either have slipped, and would
go down to be trampled underfoot in the blackest
mire if they were not helped, or who, by force of
their surrotmdings, would surely slip if the hand
were not held out to them in time. It is the kind
of work the doing of which is of infinite importance
both from the standpoint of the state and from the
standpoint of the individual; yet it is a work
which, to be successful, must emphatically be a
labor of love. Most men and women, even among
those who appreciate the need of the work and who
are not wholly insensible to the demands made
upon them by the spirit of brotherly love for man-

Civic Helpfulness 97

kind, lack cither the time, the opportunity, or the
moral and mental qualities to succeed in such
work; and to very many the sheer distaste of it
would prevent their doing it well. There is noth-
ing attractive in it save for those who are entirely
earnest and disinterested. There is no reputation,
there is not even any notoriety, to be gained from
it. Stirely people who realize that such work
ought to be done, and who realize also how ex-
ce«iingly distasteful it would be for them to do it,
ought to feel a sense of the most profoimd grati-
tude to those who with whole-hearted sincerity
have undertaken it, and should support them in
every way. This particular institution is under
the management of a creed not my own, but few
things gave me greater pleasure than to sign a bill
increasing its power and usefulness. Compared
with the vital necessity of reclaiming these poor
hunted creatures to paths of womanliness and
wholesome living, it is of infinitesimal importance
along the lines of which creed these paths lead.

Undoubtedly the best type of philanthropic
work is that which helps men and women who
are willing and able to help themselves ; for ftmda-
mentally this aid is simply what each of us should
be all the time both giving and receiving. Every
man and woman in the land ought to prize above
almost every other quality the capacity for self-
help; and yet every man and woman in the land
7

9S The Strenuous Life

will at some time or other be sorely in need of the
help of others, and at some time or other will find
that he or she can in tnm give help even to the
strongest. The quality of self-help is so splendid
a quality that nothing can compensate for its loss ;
yet, like every virtue, it can be twisted into a
fault, and it becomes a fault if carried to the
point of cold-hearted arrogance, of inability to
understand that now and then the strongest may
be in need of aid, and that for this reason alone,
if for no other, the strong should always be glad
of the chance in turn to aid the weak.

The Yoimg Men's Christian Associations and
the Young Women's Christian Associations, which
have now spread over all the cotmtry, are invalu-
able because they can reach every one. I am cer-
tainly a beneficiary myself, having not infre-
quently used them as clubs or reading-rooms when
I was in some city in which I had but little or no
personal acquaintance. In part they develop the
good qualities of those who join them; in part
they do what is even more valuable, that is, simply
give opporttmity for the men or women to develop
the qualities themselves. In most cases they pro-
vide reading-rooms and gymnasiimas, and there-
fore f timish a means for a man or woman to pass
his or her leistu'e hours in profit or amusement as
seems best. The average individual will not spend
the hours in which he is not working in doing some-

Civic Helpfulness 99

thing that is unpleasant, and absolutely the only
way permanently to draw average men or women
from occupations and amusements that are un-
healthy for soul or body is to furnish an alternative
which they will accept. To forbid all amusements,
or to treat innocent and vicious amusements as on
the same plane, simply insures recruits for the
vicious amusements. The Young Men's and
Young Women's Christian Associations would
have demonstrated their value a hundredfold over
if they had done nothing more than furnish read-
ing-rooms, gymnasiums, and places where, espe-
cially after nightfall, those without homes, or
without attractive homes, could go without
receiving injury. They furnish meeting-grotmds
for many yotmg men who otherwise would be
driven, perhaps to the saloon, or if not, then to
some cigar-store or other lotmging-place, where
at the best the conversation would not be ele-
vating, and at the worst companionships might
be formed which would lead to futtu-e disaster.
In addition to this the associations give every
opporttmity for self -improvement to those who
care to take advantage of the opporttmity, and
an astonishing number do take advantage of it.

Mention was made above of some of the sotux^es
from which at times we drew policemen while
engaged in managing the New York Police Depart-
ment. Several came from Yotmg Men's Christian

zoo The Strenuous Life

Associations. One of them whom we got from the
Bowery Branch of the Yoimg Men's Christian
Association I remember particularly. I had gone
aroimd there one night, and the secretary men-
tioned to me that they had a yoimg man who had
just rescued a woman from a burning building,
showing great strength, coolness, and courage.
The story interested me, and I asked him to send
for the yoimg fellow. When he turned up he

proved to be a Jew, Otto R , who, when very

young, had come over with his people from Russia
at the time of one of the waves of persecution in
that coimtry. He was evidently physically of the
right type, and as he had been stud3ring in the
association classes for some time he was also men-
tally fit, while his feat at the fire showed he had
good moral qualities. We were going to hold the
examinations in a few days, and I told him to try
them. Sure enough, he passed and was ap-
pointed. He made one of the best policemen we
put on. As a result of his appointment, which
meant tripling the salary he had been earning, and
making an immense botmd in social standing, he
was able to keep his mother and old grandmother
in comfort, and see to the starting of his small
brothers and sisters in life ; for he was already a
good son and brother, so that it was not surprising
that he made a good policeman.

I have not dwelt on the work of the State chari-

Civic Helpfulness ':>/. lox

table institutions, or of those who are paid-fe do
charitable work as officers and otherwise. But-it
is bare jtistice to point out that the great majority^-
of those thus paid have gone into the work, not
for the sake of the money, but for the sake of the
work itself, though, being dependent upon their
own exertions for a livelihood, they are obliged to
receive some recompense for their services.

There is one class of public servants, however,
not employed directly as philanthropic agents,
whose work, nevertheless, is as truly philanthropic
in character as that of any man or woman existing.
I allude to the public-school teachers whose schools
lie in the poorer quarters of the city. In dealing
with any body of men and women general state-
ments must be made cautiously, and it mtist
always be imderstood that there are nimierous
exceptions. Speaking generally, however, the
women teachers — I mention these because they
are more numerous than the men — ^who carry on
their work in the poorer districts of the great cities
form as high-principled and useful a body of citi-
zens as is to be found in the entire commimity, and
render an amount of service which can hardly be
paralleled by that of any other equal nimaber of
men or women. Most women who lead lives
actively devoted to intelligent work for others
grow to have a certain look of serene and high
ptupose which stamps them at once. This look

• • •

xoa .-•% 'VThe Strenuous Life

• • •

is'igmerally seen, for instance, among the higher
tjffes of women doctors, trained nurses, and of
;.those who devote their lives to work among the
poor; and it is precisely this look which one so
often sees on the faces of those public-school
teachers who have grown to regard the welfare
of their pupils as the vital interest of their own
lives. It is not merely the regular day-work the
school-teachers do, but the amotmt of attention
they pay outside their regtdar classes; the influ-
ence they have in shaping the lives of the boys, and
perhaps even more of the girls, brought in contact
with them ; the care they take of the yoimger, and
the way they unconsciously hold up ideals to the
elder bo5rs and girls, to whom they often represent
the most tangible embodiment of what is best in
American life. They are a great force for pro-
ducing good citizenship. Above all things, they
represent the most potent power in Americanizing
as well as in humanizing the children of the new-
comers of every grade who arrive here from
Europe. Where the inmiigrant parents are able
to make their way in the world, their children
have no more difficulty than the children of the
native-bom in becoming part of American life,
in sharing all its privileges and in doing all its
duties. But the children of the very poor of
foreign birth would be handicapped almost as
much as their parents, were it not for the public

Civic Helpfulness 103

schools and the start thus given them. Loyalty
to the flag is taught by precept and practice in all
these public schools, and loyalty to the principles
of good citizenship is also taught in no merely
perfunctory manner.

Here I hardly touch upon the ** little red school-
house" out in the country districts, simply be-
cause in the country districts all of our children
go to the same schools, and thereby get an inesti-
mable knowledge of the solidarity of our American
life. I have touched on this in a former article, and
I can here only say that it would be impossible to
overestimate the good done by the association this
engenders, and the excellent educational work of
the teachers. We always feel that we have given
our children no small advantage by the mere fact
of allowing them to go to these little district
schools, where they all have the same treatment
and are all tried by the same standard. But with
us in the coimtry the district school is only philan-
thropic in that excellent sense in which all joint
effort for the common good is philanthropic.

A very wholesome effect has been produced in
great cities by the university settlements, college
settlements, and similar efforts to do practical
good by bringing closer together the more and the
less fortimate in life. It is no easy task to make
movements of this kind succeed. If managed in
a spirit of patronizing condescension, or with

I04 The Strenuous Life

ignorance of the desires, needs, and passions of
those roiind about, little good indeed will come
from them. The fact that, instead of little, much
good does in reality result, is due to the entirely
practical methods and the spirit of comradeship
shown by those foremost in these organizations.
One particularly good feature has been their ten-
dency to get into politics. Of cotu^e this has its
drawbacks, but they are outweighed by the advan-
tages. Clean politics is simply one form of applied
good citizenship. No man can be a really good
citizen unless he takes a lively interest in politics
from a high standpoint. Moreover, the minute
that a move is made in politics, the people who
are helped and those who would help them grow
to have a common interest which is genuine and
absorbing instead of being in any degree artificial,
and this will bring them together as nothing else
would. Part of the good that results from such
/ community of feeling is precisely like the good that
results from the commtmity of feeling about a club,
I football team, or baseball nine. This in itself has
^a good side; but there is an even better side, due
to the fact that disinterested motives are appealed
to, and that men are made to feel that they are
working for others, for the commtmity as a whole
as well as for themselves.

There remain the host of philanthropic workers
who cannot be classed in any of the above-men-

Civic Helpfulness 105

tioned classes. They do most good when they are
in touch with some organization, although, in
addition, the strongest will keep some of their
leisure time for work on individual lines to meet
the cases where no organized relief will accom-
plish anything. Philanthropy has tmdoubtedly
been a good deal discredited both by the exceed-
ingly noxious individuals who go into it with
ostentation to make a reputation, and by the only
less noxious persons who are foolish and indis-
criminate givers. Anything that encourages pau-
perism, anything that relaxes the manly fiber and
lowers self-respect, is an unmixed evil. The soup-
kitchen style of philanthropy is as thoroughly
demoralizing as most forms of vice or oppression,
and it is of course particularly revolting when
some corporation or private individual tmder-
takes it, not even in a spirit of foolish charity,
but for purposes of self-advertisement. In a time
of sudden and widespread disaster, caused by a
flood, a blizzard, an earthquake, or an epidemic,
there may be ample reason for the extension of
charity on the largest scale to every one who needs
it. But these conditions are wholly exceptional,
and the methods of relief employed to meet them
must also be treated as wholly exceptional. In
charity the one thing always to be remembered
is that, while any man may slip and should at once
be helped to rise to his feet, yet no man can be

io6 The Strenuous Life

carried with advantage eithfer to him or to the
commtinity. The greatest possible good can be
done by the extension of a helping hand at the
right moment, but the attempt to carry any one
permanently can end in nothing but harm. The
really hard-working philanthropists, who spend
their lives in doing good to their neighbors, do not,
as a rule, belong to the ** mushy" class, and thor-
oughly realize the unwisdom of foolish and indis-
criminate giving, or of wild and crude plans of
social reformations. The young enthusiast who
is for the first time brought into contact with the
terrible suffering and stimting degradation which
are so evident in many parts of our great cities is
apt to become so appalled as to lose his head. If
there is a twist in his moral or mental make-up, he
will never regain his poise ; but if he is soimd and
healthy he will soon realize that things being bad
affords no justification for making them infinitely
worse, and that the only safe rule is for each man
to strive to do his duty in a spirit of sanity and
wholesome common sense. No one of us can
make the world move on very far, but it moves at
all only when each one of a very large niunber does
his duty.

CHARACTER AND SUCCESS

Published in the "Outlook," March 31, xgoo

CHAPTER VI.

CHARACTER AND SUCCESS.

A YEAR or two ago I was speaking to a
famous Yale professor, one of the most
noted scholars in the country, and one
who is even more than a scholar, because he is
in every sense of the word a man. We had
been discussing the Yale-Harvard football teams,
and he remarked of a certain player: "I told
them not to take him« for he was slack in his
studies, and my experience is that, as a rule, the
man who is slack in his studies will be slack in
his football work; it is character that counts in
both."

Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is
even better, but far above both is character. It
is true, of cotu'se, that a genius may, on certain
lines, do more than a brave and manly fellow who
is not a genius; and so, in sports, vast physical
strength may overcome weakness, even though
the puny body may have in it the heart of a lion.
But, in the long run, in the great battle of life,
no brilliancy of intellect, no perfection of bodily
development, will count when weighed in the
balance against that assemblage of virtues, active
and passive, of moral qualities, which we group

Z09

no The Strenuous Life

together iinder the name of character; and if
between any two contestants, even in college
sport or in college work, the difference in char-
acter on the right side is as great as the difference
of intellect or strength the other way, it is the
character side that will win.

Of course this does not mean that either intel-
lect or bodily vigor can safely be neglected. On
the contrary, it means that both should be
developed, and that not the least of the benefits
of developing both comes from the indirect effect
which this development itself has upon the
character. In very rude and ignorant com-
munities all schooling is more or less looked
down upon; but there are now very few places
indeed in the United States where elementary
schooling is not considered a necessity. There
are any number of men, however, priding them-
selves upon being "hard-headed" and "prac-
tical" who sneer at book-learning and at every
form of higher education, under the impression
that the additional mental culture is at best
useless, and is ordinarily harmful in practical
life. Not long ago two of the wealthiest men in
the United States publicly committed themselves
to the proposition that to go to college was a
positive disadvantage for a young man who
strove for success. Now, of cotirse, the very
most successful men we have ever had, men like

Character and Success m

Lincoln, had no chance to go to college, but did
have such indomitable tenacity and such keen
appreciation of the value of wisdom that they set
to work and learned for themselves far more than
they could have been taught in any academy.
On the other hand, boys of weak fiber, who go to
high school or college instead of going to work
after getting through the primary schools, may
be seriously damaged instead of benefited. But,
as a rule, if the boy has in him the right stuff,
it is a great advantage to him should his circum-
stances be so fortunate as to enable him to get
the years of additional mental training. The
trouble with the two rich men whose views are
above quoted was that, owing largely perhaps to
their own defects in early training, they did not
know what success really was. Their speeches
merely betrayed their own limitations, and did
not furnish any argument against education.
Success must always include, as its first element,
earning a competence for the support of the man
himself, and for the bringing up of those de-
pendent upon him. In the vast majority of
cases it ought to include financially rather more
than this. But the acquisition of wealth is not
in the least the only test of success. After a
certain amount of wealth has been acctunulated,
the accumulation of more is of very little conse-
quence indeed from the standpoint of success, as

lit The Strenuous Life

success should be understood both by the com-
munity and the individual. Wealthy men who
use their wealth aright are a great power for good
in the commtmity, and help to upbuild that
material national prosperity which must imderlie
national greatness ; but if this were the only kind
of success, the nation would be indeed poorly off.
Successful statesmen, soldiers, sailors, explorers,
historians, poets, and scientific men are also essen-
tial to national greatness, and, in fact, very much
more essential than any mere successful business
man can possibly be. The average man, into
whom the average boy develops, is, of course,
not going to be a marvel in any line, but, if he
only chooses to try, he can be very good in any
line, and the chances of his doing good work are
immensely increased if he has trained his mind.
Of course, if, as a result of his high-school,
academy, or college experience, he gets to think-
ing that the only kind of learning is that to be
found in books, he will do very little; but if he
keeps his mental balance, — that is, if he shows
character, — ^he will understand both what learning
can do and what it cannot, and he will be all the
better the more he can get.

A good deal the same thing is true of bodily
development. Exactly as one kind of man sneers
at college work because he does not think it bears
any immediate fruit in money-getting, so another

Character and Success 1x3

type of man sneers at college sports because he
does not see their immediate effect for good in
practical life. Of course, if they are carried to
an excessive degree, they are altogether bad. It
is a good thing for a boy to have captained his
school or college eleven, but it is a very bad thing
if, twenty years afterward, all that can be said
of him is that he has continued to take an interest
in football, baseball, or boxing, and has with
him the memory that he was once captain. A
very acute observer has pointed out that, not
impossibly, excessive devotion to sports and
games has proved a serious detriment in the
British army, by leading the officers and even
the men to neglect the hard, practical work of
their profession for the sake of racing, football,
baseball, polo, and tennis — ^tmtil they received a
very rude awakening at the hands of the Boers.
Of course this means merely that any healthy
pursuit can be abused. The student in a college
who "crams" in order to stand at the head of
his class, and neglects his health and stimts his
development by working for high marks, may do
himself much damage; but all that he proves is
that the abuse of study is wrong. The fact
remains that the study itself is essential. So it
is with vigorous pastimes. If rowing or football
or baseball is treated as the end of life by any
considerable section of a community, then that

XI4 The Strenuous Life

community shows itself to be in an unhealthy
condition. If treated as it should be, — ^that is,
as good, healthy play, — it is of great benefit, not
only to the body, but in its effect upon character.
To study hard implies character in the student,
and to work hard at a sport which entails severe
phjrsical exertion and steady training also implies
character.

All kinds of qualities go to make up character,
for, emphatically, the term should include the
positive no less than the negative virtues. If we
say of a boy or a man, *' He is of good character,"
we mean that he does not do a great many things
that are wrong, and we also mean that he does
do a great many things which imply much effort
of will and readiness to face what is disagreeable.
He must not steal, he must not be intemperate,
he must not be vicious in any way ; he must not
be mean or brutal ; he must not bully the weak.
In fact, he must refrain from whatever is evil.
But besides refraining from evil, he must do good.
He must be brave and energetic; he must be
resolute and persevering. The Bible always in-
culcates the need of the positive no less than the
negative virtues, although certain people who
profess to teach Christianity are apt to dwell
wholly on the negative. We are bidden not
merely to be harmless as doves, but also as wise
as serpents. It is very much easier to carry out

Character and Success 1x5

the former part of the order than the latter;
while, on the other hand, it is of much more
importance for the good of mankind that our
goodness should be accompanied by wisdom than
that we should merely be harmless. If with the
serpent wisdom we unite the serpent guile, ter-
rible will be the damage we do ; and if, with the
best of intentions, we can only manage to deserve
the epithet of ** harmless," it is hardly worth while
to have lived in the world at all.

Perhaps there is no more important component
of character than steadfast resolution. The boy
who is going to make a great man, or is going to
cotmt in any way in after life, must make up his
mind not merely to overcome a thousand ob-
stacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses
or defeats. He may be able to wrest success
along the lines on which he originally started.
He may have to try something entirely new. On
the one hand, he must not be volatile and irreso-
lute, and, on the other hand, he must not fear to
try a new line because he has failed in another.
Grant did well as a boy and well as a young man ;
then came a period of trouble and failure, and
then the Civil War and his opportunity; and he
grasped it, and rose imtil his name is among the
greatest in our history. Yotmg Lincoln, strug-
gling against incalculable odds, worked his way
up, trying one thing and another until he, too,

j xi6 The Strenuous Life

struck out boldly into the turbulent torrent of

our national life, at a time when only the boldest

and wisest could so carry themselves as to win

success and honor ; and from the struggle he won

! both death and honor, and stands forevermore

I among the greatest of mankind.

! Character is shown in peace no less than in

war. As the greatest fertility of invention, the
" greatest perfection of armament, will not make

( soldiers out of cowards, so no mental training and

no bodily vigor will make a nation great if it lacks
the fimdamental principles of honesty and moral
cleanliness. After the death of Alexander the
Great nearly all of the then civilized world was
divided among the Greek monarchies ruled by
his companions and their successors. This Greek
world was very brilliant and very wealthy. It
contained haughty military empires, and huge
trading cities, under republican government,
which attained the highest pitch of commercial
and industrial prosperity. Art floiuished to an
extraordinary degree ; science advanced as never
before. There were academies for men of letters ;
there were many orators, many philosophers.
Merchants and business men throve apace, and
for a long period the Greek soldiers kept the
superiority and renown they had won tmder the
mighty conqueror of the East. But the heart of
the people was incurably false, incurably treach-

••'W*- '^

C^x- ' '^^^^^•'^-^^'-d^/^

Character and Success 117

erous and debased. Almost every statesman had
his price, ahnost every soldier was a mercenary
who, for a sufficient inducement, would betray
any cause. Moral corruption ate into the whole
social and domestic fabric, until, a little more
than a century after the death of Alexander, the
empire which he had left had become a mere
glittering shell, which went down like a hotise of
cards on impact with the Romans; for the
Romans, with all their faults, were then a thor-
oughly manly race — a race of strong, virile char-
acter.

Alike for the nation and the mdividual, the
one indispensable requisite is character— character
that does and dares as well as endures, character
that is active in the performance of virtue no less
than firm in the refusal to do aught that is vicious
or degraded.

THE EIGHTH AND NINTH COM-
MANDMENTS IN POLITICS

PUBLISHBB IN THB "OuTLOOK," MaT la, tpoo

119

CHAPTER VII.

THB BIGHTH AND NINTH COMMANDMENTS IN
POLITICS.

THE two commandments which are specially
applicable in public life are the eighth and
the ninth. Not only every politician, high
or low, but every citizen interested in politics,
and especially every man who, in a newspaper or
on the stump, advocates or condemns any public
policy or any public man, should remember always
that the two cardinal points in his doctrine ought
to be, "Thou shalt not steal," and "Thou shalt
not bear false witness against thy neighbor." He
should also, of course, remember that the multi-
tude of men who break the moral law expressed
in these two commandments are not to be justified
because they keep out of the clutches of the human
law. Robbery and theft, perjury and suborna-
tion of perjury, are crimes punishable by the
courts; but many a man who technically never
commits any one of these crimes is yet morally
quite as guilty as is his less adroit but not more
wicked, and possibly infinitely less dangerous,
brother who gets into the penitentiary.

As regards the eighth commandment, while the
remark of one of the f otmders of our government,
that the whole art of politics consists in being

121

122 The Strenuous Life

honest, is an overstatement, it remains true that
absolute honesty is what Cromwell would have
called a "fimdamental" of healthy political life.
We can afford to differ on the cturency, the tariff,
and foreign policy ; but we cannot afford to differ
on the question of honesty if we expect our repub-
lic permanently to endure. No commimity is
healthy where it is ever necessary to distinguish
one politician among his fellows because "he is
honest." Honesty is not so much a credit as an
absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the
public. Unless a man is honest we have no right
to keep him in public life, it matters not how
brilliant his capacity, it hardly matters how great
his power of doing good service on certain lines
may be. Probably very few men will disagree
witi this statement in the abstract, yet in the
concrete there is much wavering about it. The
ntunber of public servants who actually take
bribes is not very numerous outside of certain
well-known centers of festering corruption. But
the temptation to be dishonest often comes in
insidious ways. There are not a few public men
who, though they would repel with indignation
an ofifer of a bribe, will give certain corporations
special legislative and executive privileges becatise
they have contributed heavily to campaign f tmds ;
will permit loose and extravagant work because a
contractor has political influence; or, at any rate,

Commandments in Politics 123

will permit a public servant to take public money
without rendering an adequate return, by con-
niving at inefficient service on the part of men
who are protected by prominent party leaders.
Various degrees of moral guilt are involved in the
multitudinous actions of this kind ; but, after all,
directly or indirectly, every such case comes dan-
gerously near the border-line of the command-
ment which, in forbidding theft, certainly by
implication forbids the connivance at theft, or
the failure to punish it. One of the favorite
schemes of reformers is to devise some method
by which big corporations can be prevented from
making heavy subscriptions to campaign fimds,
and thereby acquiring improper influence. But
the best way to prevent them from making con-
tributions for improper purposes is simply to
elect as public servants, not professional de-
noimcers of corporations, — for such men are in
practice usually their most servile tools, — ^but
men who say, and mean, that they will neither
be for nor against corporations ; that, on the one
hand, they will not be frightened from doing
them justice by popular clamor, or, on the other
hand, led by any interest whatsoever into doing
them more than justice. At the Anti-Trust Con-
ference last stuimier Mr. Bryan conmiented, with
a sneer, on the fact that "of course" New York
would not pass a law prohibiting contributions

124 The Strenuous Life

by corporations. He was right in thinking that
New York, while it retains rational civic habits,
will not pass ridiculous legislation which cannot
be made effective, and which is merely intended
to deceive dining the campaign the voters least
capable of thought. But there will not be the
slightest need for such legislation if only the
public spirit is sufficiently healthy, sixfficiently
removed alike from corruption and from dema-
gogy, to see that each corporation receives its
exact rights and nothing more; and this is
exactly what is now being done in New York by
men whom dishonest corporations dread a htm-
dred times more than they dread the demagogic
agitators who are a terror merely to honest
corporations.

It is, of course, not enough that a public oflScial
should be honest. No amoimt of honesty will
avail if he is not also brave and wise. The
weakling and the coward cannot be saved by
honesty alone; but without honesty the brave
and able man is merely a civic wild beast who
should be hunted down by every lover of right-
eotisness. No man who is corrupt, no man who
condones corruption in others, can possibly do
his duty by the community. When this truth
is accepted as axiomatic in oxu" politics, then, and
not till then, shall we see such a moral uplifting
of the people as will render, for instance. Tarn-

Commandments in Politics las

many rule in New York, as Tammany rule now
is, no more possible than it wotild be possible
to revive the robber baronage of the middle
ages.

Great is the danger to our cotmtry from the
failure among our public men to live up to the
eighth commandment, from the callousness in
the public which permits such shortcomings. Yet
it is not exaggeration to say that the danger is
quite as great from those who year in and year
out violate the ninth commandment by bearing
false witness against the honest man, and who
thereby degrade him and elevate the dishonest
man imtil they are both on the same level. The
public is quite as much harmed m the one case
as in the other, by the one set of wrong-doers as
by the other. "Liar" is just as ugly a word as
"thief," because it implies the presence of just as
ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man
lies under oath or proctires the lie of another
under oath, if he perjxires himself or suborns per-
jury, he is guilty under the statute law. Under
the higher law, tmder the great law of morality
and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if,
instead of lying in a court, he lies in a newspaper
or on the sttunp; and in all probability the evil
effects of his conduct are infinitely more wide-
spread and more pernicious. Tlie difference
between perjury and mendacity is not in the

136 The Strenuous Life

least one of morals or ethics. It is simply one of
legal forms.

The same man may break both commandments,
or one group of men may be tempted to break one
and another group of men the other. In our civic
life the worst offenders against the law of honesty
owe no small part of their immimity to those who
sin against the law by bearing false witness against
their honest neighbors. The sin is, of course,
peculiarly revolting when coupled with hypocrisy,
when it is committed in the name of morality.
Few politicians do as much harm as the news-
paper editor, the clergyman, or the lay reformer
who, day in and day out, by virulent and un-
truthful invective aimed at the upholders of
honesty, weakens them for the benefit of the
frankly vicious. We need fearless criticism of
dishonest men, and of honest men on any point
where they go wrong; but even more do we need
criticism which shaU be truthftil both in what it
says and in what it leaves imsaid — ^truthful in
words and truthftil in the impression it designs
to leave upon the readers' or hearers' minds.

We need absolute honesty in public life; and
we shall not get it imtil we remember that truth-
telling must go hand in hand with it, and that
it is quite as important not to tell an imtruth
about a decent man as it is to tell the truth about
one who is not decent.

THE BEST AND THE GOOD

PUBLISHBD IN THB "CHURCHMAN, " Ma&CH Z/, ZpOO

x«7

CHAPTER VIII.

THB BEST AND THB GOOD.

AMONG the people to whom we are all under
a very real debt of obligation for the help
they give to those seeking for good gov-
ernment at Albany is Bishop Doane. All of us
who at the State capital have been painfully
striving to wrest, often from adverse conditions,
the best results obtainable, are strengthened and
heartened in every way by the active interest the
bishop takes in every good cause, the keen intel-
ligence with which he sees "the instant need of
things," and the sane and wholesome spirit, as
remote from fanaticism as from cynicism, in
which he approaches all public questions.

Quite unconsciotisly the bishop the other day
gave an admirable summing up of his own atti-
tude in quoting an extract from the "Life" of
Archbishop Benson. In a letter which the arch-
bishop wrote to his chancellor in regard to a bill
regulating patronage in the Church of England,
occurs the following passage:

"The bill does not, of course, represent my
ideal, but it is a careftil collection of points which
cotild be claimed, which it wotild be indecent to
refuse, and which wotdd make a considerable

9 129

X30 The Strenuous Life

difference about our powers of dealing rightly
with cases. Gain that platform, and it would be
a footing for more ideal measures. I do not want
the best to be any more the deadly enemy of
the good. We climb through degrees of compar-
ison."

This is really a description as excellent as it is
epigranmiatic of the attitude which must be main-
tained by every public man, by every leader and
guide of public thought, who hopes to accomplish
work of real worth to the commxmity. It is a
melancholy fact that many of the worst laws put
upon the statute-books have been put there with
the best of intentions by thoroughly well-meaning
people. Mere desire to do right can no more by
itself make a good statesman than it can make a
good general. Of course it is entirely tmnecessary
to say that nothing atones for the lack of this
desire to do right. Exactly as the brilliant mili-
tary ability of an Arnold merely makes his treason
the more abhorrent, so our statesmanship cannot
be put upon the proper plane of purity and ability
until the condemnation visited upon a traitor like
Arnold is visited with no less severity upon the
statesman who betrays the people by corruption.
The one is as great an offense as the other.
Military power is at an end when the honor of
the soldier can no longer be trusted ; and, in the
right sense of the word, civic greatness is at an

The Best and the Good 131

end when civic righteousness is no longer its
foundation.

But, of course, every one knows that a soldier
must be more than merely honorable before he
is fit to do credit to the coxmtry; and just the
same thin^ i^ true of a statesman. He must have
high ideals, and the leader of public opinion in the
pulpit, in the press, on the platform, or on the
sttimp must preach high ideals. But the pos-
session or preaching of these high ideals may not
only be useless, but a source of positive harm, if
unaccompanied by practical good sense, if they
do not lead to the effort to get the best possible
when the perfect best is not attainable — ^and in
this life the perfect best rarely is attainable.
Every leader of a great reform has to contend,
on the one hand, with the open, avowed enemies
of the reform, and, on the other hand, with its
extreme advocates, who wish the impossible, and
who join hands with their extreme opponents to
defeat the rational friends of the reform. Of
course the typical instance of this kind of conduct
was afforded by Wendell Phillips when in 1864
he added his weight, slight though it was, to the
copperhead opposition to the reelection of Abra-
ham Lincoln.

The alliance between Blifil and Black George
is world-old. Blifil always acts in the name of
morality. Often, of coiu^e, he is not moral at all.

X3» The Strenuous Life

It is a great mistake to think that the extremist
is a better man than the moderate. Usually the
difference is not that he is morally stronger, but
that he is intellectually weaker. He is not more
virtuous. He is simply more foolish. This is
notably true in our American life of many of
those who are most pessimistic in denotmcing the
condition of oxu* politics. Certainly there is
infinite room for improvement, infinite need of
fearless and trenchant criticism; but the im-
provement can only come through intelligent and
straightforward effort. It is set back by those
extremists who by their action always invite
reaction, and, above all, by those worst enemies
of our public honesty who by their incessant
attacks upon good men give the utmost possible
assistance to the bad.

Offenders of this type need but a short shrift.
Though extremists after a fashion, they are
morally worse instead of better than the mod-
erates. There remains, however, a considerable
group of men who are really striving for the best,
and who mistakenly, though in good faith, permit
the best to be the enemy of the good. Under
very rare conditions their attitude may be right,
and because it is thus right once in a htmdred
times they are apt to be blind to the harm they
do the other ninety-nine times. These men need,
above all, to realize that healthy growth cannot

The Best and the Good

133

normally come through revolution. A revolution
is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become
habitual the country in which they take place is
going down-hill. Hysteria in any form is incom-
patible with sane and healthy endeavor. We
must never compromise in a way that means
retrogression. But in moving forward we must
realize that normally the condition of sure prog-
ress is that it shall not be so fast as to insure a
revolt and a stoppage of the upward course. In
this coxmtry especially, where what we have now
to contend with is not so much any one concrete
evil as a general lowering of the standards, we
must remember that to keep these standards high
does not at all imply that they shotild be put upon
impossible positions — positions which must ulti-
mately be abandoned. There can be no compro-
mise on the great fimdamental principles of
morality. A public man who directly or indi-
rectly breaks the eighth commandment is just as
guilty as an editor or a speaker who breaks the
ninth, and it matters little whether the fatilt be
due to venality in the one case or to morbid
vanity and mean envy in the other. If a man is
dishonest he should be driven from public life.
If a course of policy is vicious and produces harm
it should be reversed at any cost. But when we
come to the countless measures and efforts for
doing good, let us keep ever clearly in nmid that

134 The Strenuous Life

while we must always strive for the utmost good
that can be obtain©!, and must be content with
no less, yet that we do only harm if, by intem-
perate championship of the impossible good, we
cut ourselves off from the opportimity to work a
real abatement of existing and menacing evil.

PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE

Published in the "Outlook," July a8, 1900

X35

CHAPTER IX.

PROMISE AND PBRFORMANCB.

IT is customary to express wonder and horror
at the cynical baseness of the doctrines of
Machiavelli. Both the wonder and the
horror are justified, — ^though it would perhaps be
wiser to keep them for the society which the
Italian described rather than for the describer
himself, — ^but it is somewhat astonishing that
there should be so little insistence upon the fact
that Machiavelli rests his whole system upon his
contemptuous belief in the folly and low civic
morality of the mtiltitude, and their demand for
fine promises and their indifference to perform-
ance. Thus he says: "It is necessary to be a
great deceiver and hypocrite; for men are so
simple and yield so readily to the wants of the
moment that he who will trick shall always find
another who will suffer himself to be tricked. . . .
Therefore a ruler must take great care that no
word shall slip from his mouth that shall not be
full of piety, trust, htimanity, religion, and simple
faith, and he must appear to eye and ear all com-
pact of these, . . . because the vulgar are always
caught by appearance and by the event, and in
this world there are none but the vulgar."

J37

138 The Strenuous Life

It therefore appears that Machiavelli's system
is predicated partly on the entire indifference to
performance of promise by the prince and partly
upon a greedy demand for impossible promises
among the people. The infamy of the conduct
championed by Machiavelli as proper for public
men is usually what rivets the attention, but the
folly which alone makes such infamy possible is
quite as well worthy of study. Hypocrisy is a
peculiariy revolting vice alike in public and
private life; and in public life — ^at least in high
position — it can only be practised on a large scale
for any length of time in those places where the
people in mass really warrant Machiavelli's de-
scription, and are content with a complete divorce
between promise and performance.

It would be difficult to say which is the surest
way of bringing about such a complete divorce:
on the one hand, the tolerance in a public man
of the non-performance of promises which can be
kept; or, on the other hand, the insistence by
the public upon promises which they either know
or ought to know cannot be kept. When in a
public speech or in a party platform a policy is
outlined which it is known cannot or will not be
pursued, the fact is a reflection not only upon the
speaker and the platform-maker, but upon the
public feeling to which they appeal. When a
section of the people demand from a candidate

Promise and Performance 139

promises which he cannot believe that he will be
able to fulfil, and, on his refusal, supp rt some
man who cheerfully guarantees an immediate
millennium, why, imder such circtmistances the
people are striving to bring about in America
some of the conditions of public life which pro-
duced the profligacy and tyranny of medieval
Italy. Such conduct means that the capacity for
self-government has atrophied; and the hard-
headed common sense with which the American
people, as a whole, refuse to sanction such conduct
is the best possible proof and guarantee of their
capacity to perform the high and difficult task
of administering the greatest republic upon which
the sun has ever shone.

There are always politicians willing, on the one
hand, to promise everjrthing to the people, and,
on the other, to perform everything for the
machine or the boss, with chuckling delight in
the success of their efforts to hoodwink the former
and serve the latter. Now, not only shotild such
politicians be regarded as infamous, but the people
who are hoodwinked by them shotild share the
blame. The man who is taken in by, or demands,
impossible promises is not much less culpable than
the politician who deliberately makes such prom-
ises and then breaks faith. Thus when any
public man says that he "will never compromise
under any conditions," he is certain to receive

I40 The Strenuous Life

the applause of a few emotional people who do
not think correctly, and the one fact about him
that can be instantly asserted as true beyond
peradventure is that, if he is a serious personage
at all, he is deliberately lying, while it is only less
certain that he will be guilty of base and dis-
honorable compromise when the opportunity
arises. "Compromise" is so often used in a bad
sense that it is difficult to remember that properly
it merely describes the process of reaching an
agreement. Naturally there are certain subjects
on which no man can compromise. For instance,
there must be no compromise tmder any circum-
stances with official corruption, and of course no
man should hesitate to say as much. Again, an
honest politician is entirely justified in promising
on the stump that he will make no compromise
on any question of right and wrong. This
promise he can and ought to make good. But
when questions of policy arise — and most ques-
tions, from the tariff to mimicipal ownership of
public utilities and the franchise tax, are primarily
questions of policy — ^he will have to come to some
kind of working agreement with his fellows, and
if he says that he will not, he either deliberately
utters what he knows to be false, or else he insures
for himself the htmiiliation of being forced to
break his word. No decent politician need com-
promise in any way save as Washington and

Promise and Performance 141

Lincoln did. He need not go nearly as far as
Hamilton, Jefferson, and Jackson went ; but some
distance he miist go if he expects to accomplish
anything.

Again, take the case of those who promise an
impossible good to the commtmity as a whole if a
given course of legislation is adopted. The man
who makes such a promise ntiay be a well-meaning
but unbalanced enthusiast, or he may be merely
a designing demagogue. In either case the people
who listen to and believe him are not to be
excused, though they may be pitied. Softness of
heart is an admirable quality, but when it extends
its area until it also becomes softness of head, its
results are anything but admirable. It is a good
thing to combine a warm heart with a cool head.
People really fit for self-government will not be
misled by over-effusiveness in promise, and, on
the other hand, they will demand that every
proper promise shall be made good.

Wise legislation and upright administration can
tmdoubtedly work very great good to a com-
munity, and, above all, can give to each indi-
vidual the chance to do the best work for himself.
But tiltimately the individual's own faculties must
form the chief factor in working out his own sal-
vation. In the last analysis it is the thrift,
energy, self-mastery, and business intelligence of
each man which have most to do with deciding

142 The Strenuous Life

whether he rises or falls. It is easy enough to
devise a scheme of government which shall abso-
lutely ntillify all these qualities and insure failure
to everybody, whether he deserves success or not.
But the best scheme of government can do little
more than provide against injustice, and then let
the individual rise or fall on his own merits. Of
course something can be done by the State acting
in its collective capacity, and in certain instances
such action may be necessary to remedy real
wrong. Gross misconduct of individuals or cor-
porations may make it necessary for the State or
some of its subdivisions to assiune the charge of
what are called public utilities. But when all
that can be done in this way has been done, when
every individual has been saved so far as the
State can save him from the tyranny of any other
man or bod^'' of men, the individual's own quali-
ties of body and mind, his own strength of heart
and hand, will remain the determining conditions
in his career. The people who trust to or exact
promises that, if a certain political leader is fol-
lowed or a certain public policy adopted, this
great truth will cease to operate, are not merely
leaning on a broken reed, but are working for
their own xmdoing.

So much for the men who by their demands
for the impossible encourage the promise of the
impossible, whether in the domain of economic

Promise and Performance 143

legislation or of legislation which has for its object
the promotion of morality. The other side is that
no man shotild be held excusable if he does not
perform what he promises, tmless for the best and
most sufficient reason. This should be especially
true of every politician. It shows a thoroughly
unhealthy state of mind when the public pardons
with a laugh failure to keep a distinct pledge, on
the groxmd that a politician cannot be expected
to confine himself to the truth when on the stiunp
or the platform. A man shotild no more be
excused for lying on the sttmip than for lying off
the sttimp. Of course matters may so change
that it may be impossible for him, or highly
inadvisable for the coxmtry, that he shotild try
to do what he in good faith said he was going
to do. But the necessity for the change should
be made very evident, and it shotild be well
imderstood that such a case is the exception and
not the rule. As a rule, and speaking with due
regard to the exceptions, it should be taken as
axiomatic that when a man in public life pledges
himself to a certain course of action he shall as
a matter of cotu^e do what he said he would do,
and shall not be held to have acted honorably
if he does otherwise.

All great fimdamental truths are apt to sotmd
rather trite, and yet in spite of their triteness
they need to be reiterated over and over again.

144 The Strenuous Life

The visionary or the self-seeking knave who
promises the golden impossible, and the credulous
dupe who is taken in by such a promise, and who
in clutching at the impossible loses the chance of
securing the real though lesser good, are as old as
the political organizations of mankind. Through-
out the history of the world the nations who have
done best in self-government are those who have
demanded from their public men only the promise
of what can actually be done for righteousness
and honesty, and who have sternly insisted that
such promise must be kept in letter and in
spirit.

So it is with the general question of obtaining
good government. We cannot trust the mere
doctrinaire; we cannot trust the mere closet
reformer, nor yet his acrid brother who himself
does nothing, but who rails at those who endure
the heat and btirden of the day. Yet we can
trust still less those base beings who treat politics
only as a game out of which to wring a soiled
livelihood, and in whose vocabulary the word
** practical** has come to be a synon)rm for what-
ever is mean and corrupt. A man is worthless
unless he has in him a lofty devotion to an ideal,
and he is worthless also imless he strives to
realize this ideal by practical methods. He must
promise, both to himself and to others, only what
he can perform ; but what really can be performed

Promise and Performance 145

he must promise, and such promise he must at all
hazards make good.

The problems that confront us in this age are,
after all, in their essence the same as those that
have always confronted free peoples striving to
secure and to keep free government. No political
philosopher of the present day can put the case
more clearly than it was put by the wonderful
old Greeks. Says Aristotle: "Two principles
have to be kept in view: what is possible, what
is becoming; at these every man ought to aim."
Plato expresses precisely the same idea: "Those
who are not schooled and practised in truth [who
are not honest and upright men] can never manage
aright the government, nor yet can those who
spend their lives as closet philosophers; becatise
the former have no high purpose to guide their
actions, while the latter keep aloof from public
life, having the idea that even while yet living
they have been translated to the Islands of the
Blest. . . . [Men must] both contemplate the
good and try actually to achieve it. Thus the
state will be settled as a reality, and not as a
dream, like most of those inhabited by persons
fighting about shadows."*

1 Translated freely and condensed.

THE AMERICAN BOY

Published in "St. Nicholas/' May, 1900

147

CHAPTER X.

THE AMERICAN BOY.

OP course what we have a right to expect of
the American boy is that he shall ttim out
to be a good American man. Now, the
chances are strong that he won't be much of a
man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must
not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or
a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He
must be clear-minded and clean-lived, and able to
hold his own under all circtmistances and against
all comers. It is only on these conditions that he
will grow into the kind of American man of whom
America can be really proud.

There are always in life cotmtless tendencies for
good and for evil, and each succeeding generation
sees some of these tendencies strengthened and
some weakened ; nor is it by any means always,
alas I that the tendencies for evil are weakened and
those for good strengthened. But during the last
few decades there certainly have been some nota-
ble changes for good in boy life. The great growth
in the love of athletic sports, for instance, while
fraught with danger if it becomes one-sided and
unhealthy, has beyond all question had an excel-
lent eflEect in increased manliness. Forty or fifty

X49

ISO The Strenuous Life

years ago the writer on American morals was sure
to deplore the effeminacy and Itixiiry of yotmg
Americans who were bom of rich parents. The
boy who was well off then, especially in the big
Eastern cities, lived too luxuriously, took to bil-
liards as his chief innocent recreation, and felt
small shame in his inability to take part in rough
pastimes and field-sports. Nowadays, whatever
other fatdts the son of rich parents may tend to
develop, he is at least forced by the opinion of all
his associates of his own age to bear himself well in
(' manly exercises and to develop his body — and
! therefore, to a certain extent, his character — in the
: rough sports which call for pluck, endurance, and
I physical address.

Of course boys who live under such fortunate
conditions that they have to do either a good deal
of outdoor work or a good deal of what might be
called natural outdoor play do not need this ath-
letic development. In the Civil War the soldiers
who came from the prairie and the backwoods and
the rugged farms where sttmips still dotted the
clearings, and who had learned to ride in their
infancy, to shoot as soon as they could handle a
rifle, and to camp out whenever they got the
chance, were better fitted for military work than
any set of mere school or college athletes could
possibly be. Moreover, to mis-estimate athletics
is equally bad whether their importance is magni-

The American Boy tsi

fied or minimized. The Greeks were tamous ath-
letes, and as long as their athletic training had a
normal place in their lives, it was a good thing.
But it was a very bad thing when they kept up
their athletic games while letting the stem quali-
ties of soldiership and statesmanship sink into dis-
use. Some of the younger readers of this book will
certainly sometime read the famous letters of the
younger Pliny, a Roman who wrote, with what
seems to us a curiously modem touch, in the first
century of the present era. His correspondence
with the Emperor Trajan is particularly interest-
ing; and not the least noteworthy thing in it is
the tone of contempt with which he speaks of the
Greek athletic sports, treating them as the diver-
sions of an imwarlike people which it was safe to
encoiuage in order to keep the Greeks from ttiming
into anything formidable. So at one time the
Persian kings had to forbid polo, because soldiers
neglected their proper duties for the fascinations
of the game. We cannot expect the best work
from soldiers who have carried to an unhealthy
extreme the sports and pastimes which would be
healthy if indulged in with moderation, and have
neglected to leam as they should the business of
their profession. A soldier needs to know how to
shoot and take cover and shift for himself — ^not to
box or play football. There is, of course, always
the risk of thtis mistaking means for ends. Fox-

iS2 The Strenuous Life

htinting is a first-class sport ; but one of the most
abstird things in real life is to note the bated breath
with which certain excellent fox-hunters, other-
wise of quite healthy minds, speak of this admir-
able but not over-important pastime. They tend
to make it almost as much of a fetish as, in the last
century, the French and German nobles made the
chase of the stag, when they carried hunting and
game-preserving to a point which was ruinous to
the national life. Fox-himting is very good as a
pastime, but it is about as poor a business as can
be followed by any man of intelligence. Certain
writers about it are fond of quoting the anecdote
of a fox-htmter who, in the days of the English
civil war, was discovered pursuing his favorite
sport just before a great battle between the Cava-
liers and the Puritans, and right between their
lines as they came together. These writers appa-
rently consider it a merit in this man that when
his cotmtry was in a death-grapple, instead of
taking arms and hurrying to the defense of
the cause he believed right, he shotdd placidly
have gone about his usual sports. Of course, in
reality the chief serious use of fox-himting is to
encourage manliness and vigor, and to keep men
hardy, so that at need they can show themselves
fit to take part in work or strife for their native
land. When a man so far confuses ends and
means as to think that fox-hvinting, or polo, or

^^^^SHU

^^^^^^I^^HI

BH^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ -*' i^^^S

The American Boy 153

football, or whatever else the sport may be, is to

be itself taken as the end, instead of as the mere

/'means of preparation to do work that coimts when

'^he time arises, when the occasion calls — why, that

man had better abandon sport altogether.

No boy can afford to neglect his work, and with
a boy work, as a rule, means study. Of cotirse
there are occasionally brilliant successes in life
where the man has been worthless as a student
when a boy. To take these exceptions as exam-
ples would be as unsafe as it would be to advocate
blindness because some blind men have won un-
dying honor by triumphing over their physical
infirmity and accomplishing great restdts in the
world. I am no advocate of senseless and exces-
sive cramming in studies, but a boy shotdd work,
and shotdd work hard, at his lessons — in the first
place, for the sake of what he will learn, and in the
next place, for the sake of the effect upon his own
character of resolutely settling down to learn it.
Shiftlessness, slackness, indifference in studying,
are almost certain to mean inability to get on in
other walks of life. Of course, as a boy grows
older it is a good thing if he can shape his studies
in the direction toward which he has a nattiral
bent ; but whether he can do this or not, he must
put his whole heart into them. I do not believe
in mischief -doing in school hours, or in the kind
of animal spirits that results in making bad

154 The Strenuous Life

scholars ; and I believe that those boys who take
part in rough, hard play outside of school will not
find any need for horse-play in school. While they
study they should study just as hard as they play
football in a match game. It is wise to obey the
homely old adage, "Work while you work; play
while you play."

A boy needs both physical and moral courage.
Neither can take the place of the other. When
boys become men they will find out that there are
some soldiers very brave in the field who have
proved timid and worthless as politicians, and
some politicians who show an entire readiness to
take chances and asstmie responsibilities in civil
affairs, but who lack the fighting edge when op-
posed to physical danger. In each case, with sol-
diers and politicians alike, there is but half a virtue.
The possession of the courage of the soldier does
not excuse the lack of courage in the statesman
and, even less does the possession of the courage
of the statesman excuse shrinking on the field of
battle. Now, this is all just as true of boys. A cow-
ard who will take a blow without returning it is a
contemptible creature ; but, after all, he is hardly
as contemptible as the boy who dares not stand up
for what he deems right against the sneers of his
companions who are themselves wrong. Ridicule
is one of the favorite weapons of wickedness, and
it is sometimes incomprehensible how good and

The American Boy 155

brave boys will be influenced for evil by the jeers
of associates who have no one quality that calls
for respect, but who affect to laugh at the very
traits which ought to be peculiarly the cause for
pride.

There is no need to be a prig. There is no need
for a boy to preach about his own good conduct
and virtue. If he does he will make himself offen-
sive and ridiculous. But there is urgent need that
he should practise decency; that he should be
clean and straight, honest and truthful, gentle and
tender, as well as brave. If he can once get to a
proper imderstanding of things, he will have a far
more hearty contempt for the boy who has begun
a course of feeble dissipation, or who is untruthful,
or mean, or dishonest, or cruel, than this boy and
his fellows can possibly, in return, feel for him.
The very fact that the boy should be manly and
able to hold his own, that he should be ashamed
to submit to bullying without instant retaliation,
should, in return, make him abhor any form of
bullying, cruelty, or brutality.

There are two delightful books, Thomas Hughes's
"Tom Brown at Rugby," and Aldrich's "Story of
a Bad Boy," which I hope every boy still reads;
and I think American boys will always feel more
in sympathy with Aldrich's story, because there
is in it none of the fagging, and the bullying which
goes with fagging, the accoimt of which, and the

156 The Strenuous Life

acceptance of which, always puzzle an American
admirer of Tom Brown.

There is the same contract between two stories
of Kipling's. One, called '{Captains Courageous,"
describes in the liveliest way- just what a boy
should be and do. The hero is painted in the
beginning as the spoiled, over-indulged child of
wealthy parents, of a type which we do sometimes
unfortimately see, and than which there exist few
things more objectionable on the face of the broad
earth. This boy is afterward thrown on his own
resources, amid wholesome surrotmdings, and is
forced to work hard among boys and men who are
real boys and real men doing real work. The
effect is invaluable. On the other hand, if one
wishes to find t5rpes of boys to be avoided with
utter dislike, one will find them in another story
by Kipling, called "Stalky & Co.," a story which
ought never to have been written, for there is
hardly a single form of meanness which it does not
seem to extol, or of school mismanagement which
it does not seem to applaud. Bullies do not make
brave men; and boys or men of foul life cannot
become good citizens, good Americans, imtil they
change ; and even after the change scars will be
left on their souls.

The boy can best become a good man by being
a good boy — ^not a goody-goody boy, but jtist a
plain good boy. I do not mean that he must love

The American Boy isr

only the negative virtues ; I mean he must love the
positive virtues also. *'Good," in the largest
sense, should include whatever is fine, straight-
forward, clean, brave, and manly. The best boys
I know — the best men I know — ^are good at their
studies or their business, fearless and stalwart,
hated and feared by all that is wicked and de-
praved, incapable of submitting to wrong-doing,
and equally incapable of being aught but tender
to the weak and helpless. A healthy-minded boy
should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and
even more hearty indignation for the boy who
bullies girls or small boys, or tortures animals.
One prime reason for abhorring cowards is because
every good boy should have it in him to thrash the
objectionable boy as the need arises.

Of course the effect that a thoroughly manly,
thoroughly straight and upright boy can have
upon the companions of his own age, and upon
those who are yoimger, is incalculable. If he is
not thoroughly manly, then they will not respect
him, and his good qualities will coimt for but little ;
while, of course, if he is mean, cruel, or wicked,
then his physical strength and force of mind
merely make him so much the more objectionable
a member of society. He cannot do good work
if he is not strong and does not try with his whole
heart and soul to count in any contest; and his
strength will be a curse to himself and to every one

is8 The Strenuous Life

dse if he does not have thorough command over
himself and over his own evil passions, and if he
does not use his strength on the side of decency,
justice, and fair dealing.

P In short, in life, as in a football game, the prin-

' dple to follow is :

Hit the line hard ; don't foul and don't shirk,
but hit the line hard !

MILITARY PREPAREDNESS AND
UNPREPAREDNESS

Published in thi "Cbntvrt," Noveubek, 1899

X59

CHAPTER XI.

MILITARY PREPAREDNESS AND UNPREPAREDNESS.

AT the outbreak of the Spanish-American war,
M. Pierre Loti, member of the French Acad-
emy and ctdtivated exponent of the hopes
and beliefs of the average citizen of continental
Europe in regard to the contest, was at Madrid.
Dewey's victory caused him grief ; but he consoled
himself, after watching a parade of the Spanish
troops, by remarking: "They are indeed still the
solid and splendid Spanish troops, heroic in every
epoch — ^it needs only to look at them to divine the
woe that awaits the American shopkeepers when
brought face to face with such soldiers." The
excellent M. Loti had already explained Manila
by vague references to American bombs loaded
with petroletun, and to a devilish mechanical
ingenuity wholly unaccompanied by either human-
ity or courage, and he still allowed himself to dwell
on the hope that there were reserved for America
des surprises sanglantes.

M. Loti's views on military matters need not
detain us, for his attitude toward the war was
merely the attitude of continental Europe gen-
erally, in striking contrast to that of England.
But it is a curious fact that his view reflects not
XX x6x

i62 The Strenuous Life

tinfairly two different opinions, which two different
classes of our people wotild have expressed before
the event — opinions singularly falsified by the fact.
Our pessimists feared that we had lost courage and
fighting capacity ; some of our optimists asserted
that we needed neither, in view of our marvelotis
wealth and extraordinary inventiveness and me-
chanical skill. The national trait of * ' smartness, *'
used in the Yankee sense of the word, has very
good and very bad sides. Among the latter is its
tendency to create the belief that we need not pre-
\ /pare for war, because somehow we shall be able to
\win by some novel patent device, some new trick
or new invention developed on the spur of the
moment by the ingenuity of our people. In this
way it is hoped to provide a substitute for pre-
paredness — that is, for years of patient and faith-
ful attention to detail in advance. It is even
sometimes said that these mechanical devices will
be of so terrible a character as to nullify the
courage which has always in the past been the
prime factor in winning battles.

Now, as all sound military judges knew in ad-
vance must inevitably be the case, the experience
of the Spanish war completely falsified every pre-
diction of this kind. We did not win through any
special ingenuity. Not a device of any kind was
improvised during or immediately before the war
wHch was of any practical service. The " bombs

Preparedness and Unpreparedness 163

enveloped in petrolexim" had no existence save in
the brains of the Spaniards and their more credu-
lous sympathizers. Oiu* navy won because of its
preparedness and because of the splendid seaman-
ship and gunnery which had been handed down as
traditional in the service, and had been perfected
by the most careful work. The army, at the only
point where it was seriously opposed, did its work
by sheer dogged cotirage and hard fighting, in
spite of an unpreparedness which almost brought
disaster upon it, and would without doubt actually
have done so had not the defects and shortcomings
of the Spanish administration been even greater
than our own.

We won the war in a very short time, and with-
out having to expend more than the merest frac-
tion of our strength. The navy was shown to be
in good shape ; and Secretary Root, to whom the
wisdom of President McKinley has intrusted the
War Department, has already shown himself as
good a man as ever held the portfolio — a man
whose administration is certainly to be of inesti-
mable service to the army and to the country. In
consequence, too many of our people show signs
of thinking that, after all, everything was all right,
and is all right now ; that we need not bother our-
selves to learn any lessons that are not agreeable
to us, and that if in the future we get into a war
with a more formidable power than Spain, we

i64 The Strenuous Life

shall pull through somehow. Such a view is un-
just to the nation, and particularly unjust to the
splendid men of the army and of the navy, who
would be sacrificed to it, should we ever engage in
a serious war without having learned the lessons
that the year 1898 ought to have taught.

If we wish to get an explanation of the efficiency
of our navy in 1898, and of the astonishing ease
with which its victories were won, we mtist go a
long way back of that year, and study not oniy its
history, but the history of the Spanish navy for
many decades. Of course any such study must
begin with a prompt admission of the splendid
natxiral quality of our officers and men. On the
bridge, in the gun-turrets, in the engine-room, and
behind the quick-firers, every one alike, from the
highest to the lowest, was eager for the war, and
was, in heart, mind, and body, of the very type
which makes the best kind of fighting man.

Many of the officers of our ships have mentioned
to me that during the war ptmishments almost
ceased, becatise the men who got into scrapes in
times of peace were so aroused and excited by the
chance of battle that their behavior was perfect.
We read now and then of foreign services where
men hate their officers, have no commtmity of
interest with them, and no desire to fight for the
flag. Most emphatically such is not the case in
our service. The discipline is just but not severe,

Preparedness and Unpreparedness 165

unless severity is imperatively called for. As a
whole, the officers have the welfare of the men
very much at heart, and take care of their bodies
with the same forethought that they show in train-
ing them for battle. The physique of the men is
excellent, and to it are joined eagerness to leam,
and readiness to take risks and to stand danger
tmmoved.

Nevertheless, all this, though indispensable as
a base, would mean nothing whatever for the
efficiency of the navy without years of careful
preparation and training. A warship is such a
complicated machine, and such highly specialized
training is self -evidently needed to command it,
that our naval commanders, unlike our military
commanders, are freed from having to combat the
exasperating belief that the average civilian could
at short notice do their work. Of course, in
reality a special order of ability and special train-
ing are needed to enable a man to command troops
successfully ; but the need is not so obviotis as on
shipboard. No civilian could be five minutes on
a battleship without realizing his unfitness to com-
mand it; but there are any number of civilians
who firmly believe they can command regiments,
when they have not a single trait, natural or
acquired, that really fits them for the task. A
bltmder in the one case meets with instant, open,
and terrible ptinishment ; in the other, it is at the

i66 The Strenuous Life

moment only a source of laughter or exasperation
to the few, ominotis though it may be for the
future. A colonel who issued the wrong order
would cause confusion. A ship-captain by such
an order might wreck his ship. It follows that the
navy is comparatively free in time of war from the
presence in the higher ranks of men utterly tmfit
to perform their duties. The nation realizes that
it cannot improvise naval officers even out of first-
rate skippers of merchantmen and passenger-
steamers. Such men could be used to a certain
extent as under-officers to meet a sudden and
great emergency; but at best they would meet it
imperfectly, and this the public at large under-
stands.

There is, however, some failure to understand
that much the same condition prevails among
ordinary seamen. The public speakers and news-
paper writers who may be loudest in clamoring for
war are often precisely the men who clamor against
preparations for war. Whether from sheer igno-
rance or from demagogy, they frequently assert
that, as this is the day of mechanics, even on the
r sea, and as we have a large mechanical population,
! we could at once fit out any number of vessels with
^ \ men who would from the first do their duty thor-
oughly and well.

" As a matter of fact, though the sea-mechanic
has replaced the sailorman, yet it is almost as

Preparedness and Unpreparedness 167

necessary as ever that a man shotild have the sea
habit in order to be of use aboard ship ; and it is
infinitely more necessary than in former times that
a man-of-war*s-man should have especial training
with his guns before he can use them aright. In
the old days cannon were very simple; sighting
was done roughly ; and the ordinary merchant sea-
man speedily grew fit to do his share of work on a
frigate. Nowadays men must be carefiilly trained
for a considerable space of time before they can be
of any assistance whatever in handling and getting
good results from the formidable engines of de-
struction on battleship, cruiser, and torpedo-boat.
Crews cannot be improvised. To get the very best
work out of them, they should all be composed of
trained and seasoned men ; and in any event they
should not be sent against a formidable adversary
unless each crew has for a nucleus a large body of
such men filling all the important positions. From
time immemorial it has proved impossible to im-
provise so much as a makeshift navy for use
against a formidable naval opponent. Any such
effort must meet with disaster.

Most fortimately, the United States had grown
to realize this some time before the Spanish war
broke out. After the gigantic Civil War the
reaction from the strain of the contest was such
that our navy was permitted to go to pieces. Fif-
teen years after the close of the contest in which

i68 The Strenuous Life

Farragut took rank as one of the great admirals
of all time, the splendid navy of which he was the
chief ornament had become an object of derision
to every third-rate power in Europe and South
America. The elderly monitors and wooden
steamers, with their old-fashioned smooth-bore
guns, would have been as incompetent to face the
modem ships of the period as the Congress and the
^Cumberland were to face the Merrimac. Our men
were as brave as ever, but in war their courage
would have been of no more avail than the splen-
did valor of the men who sank with their guns
firing and flags flying when the great Confederate
ironclad came out to Hampton Roads.

At last the nation awoke from its lethargy.
In 1883, imder the administration of President
Arthur, when Secretary Chandler was in the Navy
Department, the work was begun. The first step
taken was the refusal to repair the more antiquated
wooden ships, and the building of new jteel ships
to replace them. One of the ships thus laid down
was the Boston, which was in Dewey's fleet. It is
therefore merely the literal truth to say that the
preparations which made Dewey's victory possible
began just fifteen years before the famous day
when he steamed into Manila Bay. Every sen-
ator and congressman who voted an appropriation
which enabled Secretary Chandler to begin the
upbuilding of the new navy, the President who

Preparedness and Unpreparcdness 169

advised the cotirse, the secretary who had the
direct management of it, the ship-builder in whose
yard the ship was constructed, the skilled experts
who planned her hull, engine, and guns, and the
skilled workmen who worked out these plans, all
alike are entitled to their share in the credit of the
great Manila victory.

The majority of the men can never be known
by name, but the fact that they did well their part
in the deed is of vastly more importance than the
obtaining of any reward for it, whether by way of
recognition or otherwise ; and this fact will always
remain. Nevertheless, it is important for our own
future that, so far as possible, we should recognize
the men who did well. This is peculiarly impor-
tant in the case of Congress, whose action has been
the indispensable prerequisite for every effort to
build up the navy, as Congress provided the
means for each step.

As there was always a division in Congress,
while in the popular mind the whole body is apt
to be held accotmtable for any deed, good or ill,
done by the majority, it is much to be wished, in
the interest of justice, that some special historian
of the navy would take out from the records the
votes, and here and there the speeches, for and
against the successive measures by which the navy
was built up. Every man who by vote and voice
from time to time took part in adding to our fleet,

I70 The Strenuous Life

in bu)ang the armor, in preparing the gun-fac-
tories, in increasing the personnel and enabling it
to practise, deserves well of the whole nation, and
a record of his action shotild be kept, that his
children may feel proud of him. No less cleariy
should we understand that throughout these
fifteen years the men who, whether from honest
but misguided motives, from short-sightedness,
from lack of patriotism, or from demagogy, op-
posed the building up of the navy, have deserved
ill of the nation, exactly as did those men who
recently prevented the purchase of armor for the
battleships, or, under the lead of Senator Gk)rman,
prevented the establishment of our army on the
footing necessary for our national needs. If dis-
aster comes through lack of preparedness, the
fault necessarily lies far less with the men under
whom the disaster actually occurs than with those
to whose wrong-headedness or short-sighted indif-
ference in time past the lack of preparedness is due.
The mistakes, the bltmders, and the short-
comings in the army management during the sum-
mer of 1898 should be credited mainly, not to any
one in office in 1898, but to the public servants of
the people, and therefore to the people themselves,
who permitted the army to rust since the Civil War
with a wholly faulty administration, and with no
chance whatever to perfect itself by practice, as
the navy was perfected. In like manner, any

Preparedness and Unpreparedncss 171

trouble that may come upon the army, and there-
fore upon the nation, in the next few years, will
be due to the failure to provide for a thoroughly
reorganized regular army of adequate size in 1898 ;
and for this f aflure the members in the Senate and
the House who took the lead against increasing
the regular army, and reorganizing it, will be
primarily responsible. On them will rest the
blame of any check to the national arms, and the
honor that will undoubtedly be won for the flag
by our army will have been won in spite of their
sinister opposition.

In May, 1898, when our battleships were lying
off Havana and the Spanish torpedo-boat de-
stroyers were crossing the ocean, our best com-
manders felt justifiable anxiety because we had
no destroyers to guard our fleet against the Span-
ish destroyers. Thanks to the blimders and lack
of initiative of the Spaniards, they made no good
use whatever of their formidable boats, sending
them against oiu* ships in daylight, when it was
hopeless to expect anjrthing from them.

But in war it is tmsaf e to trust to the blunders
of the adversary to offset our own blunders. Many
a naval officer, when with improvised craft of
small real worth he was trying to guard our battle-
ships against the terrible possibilities of an attack
by torpedo-boat destroyers in the darkness, must
have thought with bitterness how a year before,

172 The Strenuous Life

when Senator Lcxige and those who thought like
him were striving to secure an adequate support
of large, high-class torpedo-boats, the majority of
the Senate followed the lead of Senator Gk)rman in
opposition. So in the future, if what we all most
earnestly hope will not happen does happen, and
we are engaged in war with some formidable sea
power, any failure of our arms resulting from an
inadequate ntimber of battleships, or imperfectly
prepared battleships, will have to be credited to
those members of Congress who opposed increas-
ing the nimiber of ships, or opposed giving them
proper armament, for no matter what reason. On
the other hand,^he national consciousness of
capacity to vindicate national hono^must be due
mainly to the action of those congressmen who
have in fact built up our fleet.

Secretary Chandler was succeeded by a line of
men, each of whom, however he might differ from
the others politically and personally, sincerely
desired and strove hard for the upbuilding of the
navy. Under Messrs. Whitney, Tracy, Herbert,
and Long the work has gone steadily forward,
thanks, of course, to the fact that successive Con-
gresses, Democratic and Republican alike, have
permitted it to go forward.

But the appropriation of money and the build-
ing of ships were not enough. We must keep
Steadily in mind that not only was it necessary to

itii Mi

Preparedness and Unpreparedness 173

btiild the navy, but it was equally necessary to
train otir officers and men aboard it by actual
practice. If in 1883 we had been able suddenly
to purchase our present battleships, cruisers, and
torpedo-boats, they could not have been handled
with any degree of efficiency by our officers and
crews as they then were. Still less would it be
possible to handle them by improvised crews. In
an emergency bodies of men like our naval militia
can do special bits of work excellently, and,
thanks to their high average of character and in-
tellect, they are remarkably good makeshifts, but
it would be folly to expect from them all that is
expected from a veteran crew of trained man-of-
war's-men. And if we are ever pitted ship for
ship on equal terms against the first-class navy of
a first-class power, we shall need our best captains
and our best crews if we are to win.

As fast as the new navy was built we had to
break in the men to handle it. The young officers
who first took hold and developed the possibilities
of our torpedo-boats, for instance, really deserve
as much credit as their successors have rightly
received for handling them with dash and skill
during the war. The admirals who first exer-
cised the new ships in squadrons were giving the
training without which Dewey and Sampson would
have foimd their tasks incomparably more diffi-
cult. As for the ordinary officers and seamen, of

174 The Strenuous Life

course it was their incessant practice in handling
the ships and the guns at sea, in all kinds of
weather, both alone and in company, year in and
year out, that made them able to keep up the
never-relaxing night blockade at Santiago, to
steam into Manila Bay in the darkness, to prevent
breakdowns and make repairs of the machinery,
and finally to hit what they aimed at when the
battle was on. In the naval bureaus the great
bulk of what in the army would be called staff
places are held by line officers. The men who
made ready the guns were the same men who after-
ward used them. In the Engineering Btu-eau
were the men who had handled or were to handle
the engines in action. The Bureau of Navigation,
the Bureau of Equipment, the Bureau of Informa-
tion, were held by men who had commanded ships
in actual service, or who were thus to command
them against the Spaniards. The head of the
Bureau of Navigation is the chief of staff, and he
has always been an officer of distinction, detailed,
like all of the other bureau chiefs, for special ser-
vice. From the highest to the lowest officer,
every naval man had seen and taken part, during
time of peace, in the work which he would have
to do in time of war. The commodores and cap-
tains who took active part in the war had com-
manded fleets in sea service, or at the least had
been in command of single ships in these fleets.

Preparedness and Unpreparedness 175

There was not one thing they were to do in war
which they had not done in peace, save actually
receive the enemy's fire.

Contrast this with the army. The material in
the army is exactly as good as that in the navy,
and in the lower ranks the excellence is as great.
In no service, ashore or afloat, in the world could
better men of their grade be fotmd than the lieu-
tenants, and indeed the captains, of the infantry
and dismotmted cavalry at Santiago. But in the
army the staff bureaus are permanent positions,
instead of being held, as of course they should be,
by officers detailed from the line, with the needs
of the line and experiences of actual service fresh
in their minds.

The artillery had for thirty-five years had no
field-practice that was in the slightest degree ade-
quate to its needs, or that compared in any way
with the practice received by the different com-
panies and troops of the infantry and cavalry.
The bureaus in Washington were absolutely en-
meshed in red tape, and were held for the most
part by elderly men, of fine records in the past,
who were no longer fit to break through routine
and to show the extraordinary energy, business
capacity, initiative, and willingness to accept
responsibility which were needed. Finally, the
higher officers had been absolutely denied that
chance to practise their profession to which the

176 The Strenuous Life

higher officers of the navy had long been accus-
tomed. Every time a warship goes to sea and
cruises around the world, its captain has just such
an experience as the colonel of a regiment would
have if sent off for a six or eight months' march,
and if during those six or eight months he inces-
santly practised his regiment in every item of duty
which it would have to perform in battle. Every
warship in the American navy, and not a single
regiment in the American army, had had this
experience.

Every naval captain had exercised command for
long periods, under conditions which made up
nine-tenths of what he would have to encotmter
in war. Hardly a colonel had such an experience
to his credit. The regiments were not even assem-
bled, but were scattered by companies here and
there. After a man ceased being a junior captain
he usually had hardly any chance for field-service ;
it was the lieutenants and junior captains who did
most of the field-work in the West of recent years.
Of course there were exceptions ; even at Santiago
there were generals and colonels who showed them-
selves not only good fighters, but masters of their
profession; and in the Philippines the war has
developed admirable leaders, so that now we have
ready the right man ; but the general rule remains
true. The best man alive, if allowed to rust at a
three-company post, or in a garrison near some big

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^m^^mi^^^^BMI^^BHIKmh^*^

Preparedness and Unpreparedness 177

city, for ten or fifteen years, will find himself in
straits if suddenly called to command a division,
or mayhap even an army corps, on a foreign expe-
dition, especially when not one of his important
subordinates has ever so much as seen five thou-
sand troops gathered, fed, sheltered, maneuvered,
and shipped. The marvel is, not that there was
bltmdering, but that there was so little, in the late
war with Spain.

Captain (now Colonel) John Bigelow, Jr., in his
account of his personal experiences in command
of a troop of cavalry during the Santiago cam-
paign, has pictured the welter of confusion during
that campaign, and the utter lack of organization,
and of that skilled leadership which can come only
through practice. His book should be studied by
every man who wishes to see our army made what
it should be. In the Santiago campaign the army
was more than once tmcomfortably near grave
disaster, from which it was saved by the remark-
able fighting qualities of its individual fractions,
and, above all, by the incompetency of its foes.
To go against a well-organized, well-handled, well-
led foreign foe tmder such conditions would inev-
itably have meant failure and humiliation. Of
course party demagogues and the thoughtless
generally are sure to credit these disasters to the
people imder whom they occur, to the secretary,
or to the commander of the army.

178 The Strenuous Life

As a matter of fact, the blame must rest in all
such cases far less with them than with those
responsible for the existence of the system. Even
if we had the best secretary of war the cotmtry
could supply and the best general the army could
furnish, it would be impossible for them offhand
to get good results if the nation, through its repre-
sentatives, had failed to make adequate provision
for a proper army, and to provide for the reorgan-
ization of the army and for its practice in time of
peace. The whole staff system, and much else,
should be remodeled. Above all, the army should
be practised in mass in the actual work of march-
ing and camping. Only thus will it be possible to
train the commanders, the quartermasters, the
commissaries, the doctors, so that they may by
actual experience leam to do their duties, as naval
officers by actual experience have learned to do
theirs. Only thus can we do full justice to as
splendid and gallant a body of men as any nation
ever had the good luck to include among its armed
defenders.

ADMIRAL DEWEY

Published in "McClurb's Magazine/' October, 1899

X79

CHAPTER XII.

ADMIRAL DEWEY.

ADMIRAL DEWEY has done more than add
a glorioiis page to otir history; more even
than do a deed the memory of which will
always be an inspiration to his coimtrymen, and
especially his cotmtrymen of his own profession.
He has also taught us a lesson which should have
profound practical effects, if only we are willing to
leam it aright.

In the first place, he partly grasped and partly
made his opporttmity. Of course, in a certain
sense, no man can absolutely make an opportu-
nity. There were a ntmiber of admirals who
during the dozen years preceding the Spanish war
were retired without the opportunity of ever
coming where it was possible to distinguish them-
selves ; and it may be that some of these lacked
nothing but the chance. Nevertheless, when the
chance does come, only the great man can see it
instantly and use it aright. In the second place,
it must always be remembered that the power of
using the chance aright comes only to the man who
has f aithftdly and for long years made ready him-
self and his weapons for the possible need. Finally,
and most important of all, it should ever be kept

z8z

x8a The Strenuous Life

in mind that the man who does a great work must
ahnost invariably owe the possibility of doing it to
the faithful work of other men, either at the time
or long before. Without his brilliancy their labor
might be wasted, but without their labor his bril-
liancy would be of no avail.

It has been said that it was a mere accident that
Dewey happened to be in command of the Asiatic
Squadron when the war with Spain broke out.
This is not the fact. He was sent to command it
in the falJ of 1897, because, to use the very lan-
guage employed at the time, it was deemed wise
to have there a man *' who could go into Manila if
necessary." He owed the appointment to the
high professional reputation he enjoyed, and to
the character he had established for willingness
to accept responsibility, for sotmd judgment, and
for entire fearlessness.

Probably the best way (although no way is
infallible) to tell the worth of a naval commander
as yet tmtried in war is to get at the estimate in
which he is held by the best fighting men who
would have to serve tmder him. In the siunmer
of 1897 there were in Washington captains and
commanders who later won honor for themselves
and their country in the war with Spain, and who
were already known for the dash and skill with
which they handled their ships, the excellence of
their gun practice, the good discipline of their

t:ie

■. ar.

f,%l

Admiral Dewey 183

crews, and their eager desire to win honorable
renown. All these men were a unit in their faith
in the then Commodore Dewey, in their desire to
serve under him, should the chance arise, and in
their unquestioning belief that he was the man to
meet an emergency in a way that would do credit
to the flag.

An excellent test is afforded by the readiness
which the man has shown to take responsibility
in any emergency in the past. One factor in
Admiral Dewey's appointment — of which he is
very possibly ignorant — ^was the way in which he
had taken responsibility in purchasing coal for the
squadron that was to have been used against Chile,
if war with Chile had broken out, at the time Gen-
eral Harrison was President. A service will do
well or ill at the outbreak of war very much in pro-
portion to the way it has been prepared to meet
the outbreak during the preceding months. Now,
it is often impossible to say whether the symptoms
that seem to forbode war will or will not be fol-
lowed by war. At one time, under President Har-
rison, we seemed as near war with Chile as ever
we seemed to war with Spain under President Mc-
Kinley. Therefore, when war threatens, prepara-
tions must be made in any event ; for the evil of
what proves to be the needless expenditure of
money in one instance is not to be weighed for a
moment against the failure to prepare in the other.

i84 The Strenuous Life

But only a limited number of men have the moral
courage to make these preparations, because there
is always risk to the individual making them.
Laws and regulations must be stretched when an
emergency arises, and yet there is always some dan-
ger to the person who stretches them ; and, more-
over in time of sudden need, some indispensable
article can very possibly only be obtained at an
altogether exorbitant price. If war comes, and the
article, whether it be a cargo of coal, or a collier,
or an auxiliary naval vessel, proves its usefulness,
no complaint is ever made. But if the war does not
come, then some small demagogue, some cheap
economist, or some imdersized superior who is
afraid of taking the responsibility himself, may
blame the man who bought the article and say that
he exceeded his authority; that he showed more
zeal than discretion in not waiting for a few days,
etc. These are the risks which must be taken, and
the men who take them should be singled out for
reward and for duty. Admiral Dewey's whole
action in connection with the question of coal sup-
ply for our fleet during the Chilean scare marked
him as one of these men.

No one who has not some knowledge of the
army and navy will appreciate how much this
means. It is necessary to have a complete system
of checks upon the actions, and especially upon the
expenditures, of the army and navy; but the

Admiral Dewey 185

present system is at times altogether too complete,
especially in war. The efficiency of the quarter-
masters and commissary officers of the army in
the war with Spain was very seriously marred by
their perfectly justifiable fear that the slightest
departure from the requirements of the red-tape
regulations of peace would result in the docking
of their own pay by men more concerned in en-
forcing the letter of the law than in seeing the
army clothed and fed. In the navy, before the
passage of the Personnel Bill, a positive premium
was put on a man's doing nothing but keep out
of trouble ; for if only he could avoid a court mar-
tial, his promotions would take care of themselves,
so that from the selfish standpoint no possible
good could come to him from taking riste, while
they might cause him very great harm. The best
officers in the service recognized the menace that
this state of affairs meant to the service, and strove
to counterbalance it in every way. No small part
of the good done by the admirable War College,
under Captains Mahan, Taylor, and Goodrich, lay
in their insistence upon the need of the naval
officer's instantly accepting responsibility in any
crisis, and doing what was best for the flag, even
though it was probable the action might be dis-
avowed by his immediate superiors, and though
it might result in his own personal inconvenience
and detriment. This was taught not merely as an

i86 The Strenuous Life

abstract theory, but with direct reference to con-
crete cases ; for instance, with reference to taking
possession of Hawaii, if a revolution should by
chance break out there during the presence of an
American warship, or if the warship of a foreign
power attempted to interfere with the affairs of
the island.

For the work which Dewey had to do willing-
ness to accept responsibility was a prime reqtiisite.
A man afraid to vary in times of emergency from
the regulations laid down in time of peace would
never even have got the coal with which to steam
to Manila from Hongkong the instant the crisis
came. We were peculiarly fortunate in our Secre-
tary of the Navy, Mr. Long ; but the best secretary
that ever held the navy portfolio could not suc-
cessfully direct operations on the other side of the
world. All that he could do was to choose a good
man, give him the largest possible liberty of action,
and back him up in every way ; and this Secretary
Long did. But if the man chosen had been timid
about taking risks, nothing that could be done for
him would have availed. Such a man would not
have disobeyed orders. The danger would have
been of precisely the contrary character. He
would scrupulously have done just whatever he
was told to do, and then would have sat down and
waited for further instructions, so as to protect
himself if something happened to go wrong. An

Admiral Dcwcy 187

infinity of excuses can always be found for non-
action.

Admiral Dewey was sent to command the fleet
on the Asiatic station primarily because he had
such a record in the past that the best officers in
in the navy believed him to be peculiarly a man
of the fighting temperament and fit to meet emer-
gencies, and because he had shown his willingness
to asstmie heavy responsibilities. How amply he
justified his choice it is not necessary to say. On
our roll of naval heroes his name will stand second
to that of Farragut alone, and no man since the
Civil War, whether soldier or civilian, has added
so much to the honorable renown of the nation or
has deserved so well of it. For our own sakes, and
in particular for the sake of any naval officer who
in the future may be called upon to do such a piece
of work as Dewey did, let us keep in mind the
further fact that he could not have accomplished
his feat if he had not had first-class vessels and
excellently trained men ; if his warships had not
been so good, and his captains and crews such
thorough masters of their art. A man of less
daring coiuage than Dewey would never have
done what he did ; but the coiuage itself was not
enough. The Spaniards, too, had coiuage. What
they lacked was energy, training, forethought.
They fought their vessels until they burned or
sank; but their gunnery was so poor that they

i88 The Strenuous Life

did not kill a man in the American fleet. Even
Dewey's splendid capacity would not have enabled
him to win the battle of Manila Bay had it not
been for the traditional energy and seamanship
of otir naval service, so well illustrated in his cap-
tains, and the excellent gun practice of the crews,
the result of years of steady training. Further-
more, even this excellence in the personnel would
not have availed if under a succession of secre-
taries of the navy, and through the wisdom of a
succession of Congresses, the material of the navy
had not been built up as it actually was.

If war with Spain had broken out fifteen years
before it did, — ^that is, in the year 1883, before
our new navy was built, — it would have been
physically impossible to get the results we actually
did get. At that time our navy consisted of a
collection of rusty monitors and antiquated
wooden ships left over from the Civil War, which
could not possibly have been matched against
even the navy of Spain. Every proposal to in-
crease the navy was then violently opposed with
exactly the same argtmients used nowadays by
the men who oppose building up our army. The
congressmen who rallied to the support of Senator
Gorman in his refusal to furnish an adequate army
to take care of the Philippines and meet the new
national needs, or who defeated the proposition
to buy armor-plate for the new ships, assimied pre-

Admiral Dewey 189

dsdy the ground that was taken by the men who,
prior to 1883, had succeeded in preventing the
rebuilding of the navy. Both alike did all they
could to prevent the upholding of the national
honor in times of emergency. There were the
usual arguments: that we were a great peaceftd
people, and would never have to go to war; that
if we had a navy or army we should be tempted
to use it and therefore embark on a career of mili-
tary conquest ; that there was no need of regulars
anyhow, because we could always raise volunteers
to do anjrthing ; that war was a barbarous method
of settling disputes, and too expensive to tmder-
take even to avoid national disgrace, and so on.

But fortunately the men of sturdy common
sense and sound patriotism proved victors, and
the new navy was begun. Its upbuilding was not
a party matter. The first ships were laid down
under Secretary Chandler; Secretary Whitney
continued the work; Secretary Tracy carried it
still further; so did Secretary Herbert, and then
Secretary Long. Congress after Congress voted
the necessary money. We have never had as
many ships as a nation of such size and such vast
interests really needs ; but still by degrees we have
acquired a small fleet of battleships, cruisers, gun-
boats, and torpedo-boats, all excellent of their
class. The squadron with which Dewey entered
Manila Bay included ships laid down or launched

190 The Strenuous Life

under Secretaries Chandler, Whitney, Tracy, and
Herbert; and all four of these secretaries, their
naval architects, the chiefs of bureaus, the young
engineers and constructors, the outside contract-
ors, the shipjrard men like Roach, Cramp, and
Scott, and, finally and emphatically, the congress-
men who during these fifteen years voted the
supplies, are entitled to take a just pride in their
share of the glory of the achievement. Every
man in Congress whose vote made possible the
building of the Raleigh, the Olympia, the Detroit^
or the putting aboard them and their sister ships
the modem eight-inch or rapid-fire five-inch guns,
or the giving them the best engines and the means
wherewith to practise their crews at the targets —
every such man has the right to tell his children
that he did his part in securing Dewey's victory,
and that, save for the action of him and his fellows,
it could not have been won. This is no less true
of the man who planned the ships and of the other
men, whether in the government service or in
private employment, who built them, from the
head of the great business concern which put up
an armor-plate factory down to the iron-worker
who conscientiously and skilftdly did his part on
gun-shield or gun.

So much for the men who furnished the material
and the means for assembling and practising the
personnel. The same praise must be given the

Admiral Dewey 191

men who actually drilled the personnel, part of
which Dewey used. If our ships had merely been
built and then laid up, if officers and crews had not
been exercised season after season in all weathers
on the high seas in handling their ships both sepa-
rately and in squadron, and in practising with the
guns, all the excellent material would have availed
us little. Exactly as it is of no use to give an
army the best arms and equipment if it is not also
given the chance to practise with its arms and
equipment, so the finest ships and the best natural
sailors and fighters are useless to a navy if the
most ample opportunity for training is not allowed.
Only incessant practice will make a good gunner;
though, inasmuch as there are natural marksmen
as well as men who never can become good marks-
men, there should always be the widest intelli-
gence displayed in the choice of gunners. Not
only is it impossible for a man to learn how to
handle a ship or do his duty aboard her save by
long cruises at sea, but it is also impossible for a
a good single-ship captain to be an efficient unit
in a fleet imless he is accustomed to maneuver as
part of a fleet.

It is particularly true of the naval service that
the excellence of any portion of it in a given crisis
will depend mainly upon the excellence of the
whole body, and so the triumph of any part is
legitimately felt to reflect honor upon the whole

i9t The Strenuous Life

and to have beai participated in by every one.
Dewey's captains could not have followed him
with the precision they displayed, could not have
shown the excellent gun practice they did show —
in short, the victory would not have been possible
had it not been for the unwearied training and
practice given the navy during the dozen years
previous by the admirals, the captains, and the
crews who incessantly and in all weathers kept
their vessels exercised, singly and in squadron,
until the men on the bridge, the men in the gun-
turrets, and the men in the engine-rooms knew
how to do their work perfectly, alone or together.
Every officer and man, from the highest to the
lowest, who did his full duty in raising the navy to
the standard of efficiency it had reached on May i,
1898, is entitled to feel some personal share in the
glory won by Dewey and Dewey's men. It would
have been absolutely impossible not merely to
improvise either the material or the personnel
with which Dewey fought, but to have produced
them in any limited ntunber of years. A thor-
oughly good navy takes a long time to build up,
and the best officer embodies always the traditions
of a first-class service. Ships take years to build,
crews take years before they become thoroughly
expert, while the officers not only have to pass
their early youth in a course of special training,
but cannot possibly rise to supreme excellence in

Admiral Dewey 193

their profession tinless they make it their life-work.
We shotild therefore keep in mind that the hero
cannot win save for the forethought, energy,
courage, and capacity of countless other men.
Yet we must keep in mind also that all this fore-
thought, energy, courage, and capacity will be
wasted unless at the supreme moment some man
of the heroic type arises capable of using to the
best advantage the powers lying ready to hand.
Whether it is Nelson, the greatest of all admirals,
at Abukir, Copenhagen, or Trafalgar ; or Farragut,
second only to Nelson, at New Orleans or Mobile ;
or Dewey at Manila— the great occasion must meet
with the great man, or the result will be at worst a
failure, at best an indecisive success. The nation
must make ready the tools and train the men to
use them, but at the crisis a great triumph can be
achieved only should some heroic man appear.
Therefore it is right and seemly to pay homage
of deep respect and admiration to the man when
he does appear.

Admiral Dewey performed one of the great feats
of all time. At the very outset of the Spanish war
he struck one of the two decisive blows which
brought the war to a conclusion, and as his was the
first fight, his success exercised an incalculable
effect upon the whole conflict. He set the note
of the war. He had carefully prepared for action
during the months he was on the Asiatic coast.
13

X^'

194 The Strenuous Life

He had his plans thoroughly matured, and he
struck the instant that war was declared. There
was no delay, no hesitation. As soon as news
came that he was to move, his war-steamers
turned their bows toward Manila Bay. There was
nothing to show whether or not Spanish mines and
forts would be efficient ; but Dewey, cautious as
he was at the right time, had not a particle of fear
of taking risks when the need arose. In the tropic
night he steamed past the forts, and then on over
the mines to where the Spanish vessels lay. What
material inferiority there was on the Spanish side
was nearly made up by the forts and mines. The
overwhelming difference was moral, not material.
It was the difference in the two commanders, in
the officers and crews of the two fleets, and in the
naval service, afloat and ashore, of the two nations.
On the one side there had been thorough prepara-
tion ; on the other, none that was adequate. It
would be idle to recapitulate the results. Steam-
ing in with cool steadiness, Dewey's fleet cut the
Spaniards to pieces, while the Americans were
practically unhurt. Then Dewey drew off to
breakfast, satisfied himself that he had enough
ammimition, and returned to stamp out what
embers of resistance were still feebly smoldering.

The victory instn-ed the fall of the Philippines,
for Manila surrendered as soon as owr land forces
arrived and were in position to press their attack

Admiral Dewey

195

home. The work, however, was by no means
done, and Dewey's diplomacy and firmness were
given fiall scope for the year he remained in Manila
waters, not only in dealing with Spaniards and
insurgents, but in making it evident that we would
tolerate no interference from any hostile European
power. It is not yet the time to show how much
he did in this last respect. Suffice it to say that by
his firmness he effectually frustrated any attempt
to interfere with otn- rights, while by his tact he
avoided giving needless offense, and he acted in
hearty accord with owe cordial well-wishers, the
English naval and diplomatic representatives in
the islands.

Admiral Dewey comes back to his native land
having won the right to a greeting such as has been
given to no other man since the Civil War.

GRANT

Speech Delivered at Galena, Illinois,
April a7» zgoo

CHAPTER XIII.

GRANT.

IN the long run every great nation instinctively
recognizes the men who peculiarly and pre-
eminently represent its own type of great-
ness. Here in otir country we have had many
public men of high rank — soldiers, orators, con-
structive statesmen, and popular leaders. We
have even had great philosophers who were also
leaders of popular thought. Each one of these
men has had his own group of devoted followers,
and some of them have at times swayed the
nation with a power such as the foremost of all
hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip
away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as through
the clearing air we look back with keener wisdom
into the nation's past, mightiest among the mighty
dead loom the three great figures of Washington,
Lincoln, and Grant. There are great men also
in the second rank ; for in any gallery of merely
national heroes Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson
and Jackson, would surely have their place. But
these three greatest men have taken their place
among the great men of all nations, the great men
of all time. They stood supreme in the two great
crises of otir history, on the two great occasions

200 The Strenuous Life

when we stood in the van of all humanity and
struck the most effective blows that have ever
been struck for the cause of htmian freedom tmder
the law, for that spirit of orderly liberty which
mtist stand at the base of every wise movement
to secure to each man his rights, and to guard
each from being wronged by his fellows.

Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and
it was his good f orttme to win the highest renown
alike as soldier and statesman. In the second
and even greater struggle the deeds of Lincoln
the statesman were made good by those of Grant
the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the
work that dropped from Lincoln's tired hands
when the assassin's bullet went home, and the
sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever.

It was no mere accident that made our three
mightiest men, two of them soldiers, and one the
great war President. It is only through work and
strife that either nation or individual moves on to
greatness. The great man is always the man of
mighty effort, and usually the man whom grindmg
need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and
peace are good things, are great blessings, but
only if they come honorably ; and it is those who
fearlessly ttmi away from them, when they have
not been earned, who in the long run deserve best
of their cotmtry. In the sweat of our brows do
we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at

Vlys^ S. Grant.

-V^r-^^y^y

Grant wx

times, yet it is far more bitter to eat the bread
that is unearned, tmwon, tmdeserved. America
must nerve herself for labor and peril. The men
who have made our natioitkl greatness are those
who faced danger and overcame it, who met diflB-
culties and surmoimted them, not those whose
lines were cast in such pleasant places that t. ii
and dread were ever far from them.

Neither was it an accident that otir three
leaders were men who, while they did not shrink
from war, were nevertheless heartily men of
peace. The man who will not fight to avert
or undo wrong is but a poor creature ; but, after
all, he is less dangerous than the man who fights
on the side of wrong. Again and again in a
nation's history the time may, and indeed some-
times must, come when the nation's highest duty
is war. But peace must be the normal condition,
or the nation will come to a bloody doom. Twice
in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and twice in
lesser crises, in 181 2 and 1898, the nation was
called to arms in the name of all that makes the
words "honor," "freedom," and "justice" other
than empty sotmds. On each occasion the net
result of the war was greatly for the benefit of
mankind. But on each occasion this net result
was of benefit only because after the war came
peace, came justice and order and liberty. K the
Revolution had been followed by bloody anarchy*

2oi The Strenuous Life

if the Declaration of Independence had not been
supplemented by the adoption of the Constitution,
if the freedom won by the sword of Washington
had not been supplemented by the stable and
orderly government which Washington was instru-
mental in fottnding, then we should have but
added to the chaos of the world, and our victories
would have told against and not for the betterment
of mankind. So it was with the Civil War. If
the four iron years had not been followed by
peace, they would not have been justified. If the
great silent soldier, the Hammer of the North, had
struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many
conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to
rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then the
war would have been fought in vain, and worse
than in vain. If the Union, which so many men
shed their blood to restore, were not now a imion
in fact, then the precious blood would have been
wasted. But it was not wasted ; for the work of
peace has made good the work of war, and North
and South, East and West, we are now one people
in fact as well as in name; one in purpose, in
fellow-feeling, and in high resolve, as we stand
to greet the new century, and, high of heart, to
face the mighty tasks which the coming years will
stirely bring.

Grant and his fellow-soldiers who fought
through the war, and his fellow-statesmen who

Grant 203

completed the work partly done by the soldiers,
not only left tis the heritage of a reunited country
and of a land from which slavery had been ban-
ished, but left us what was quite as important,
the great memory of their great deeds, to serve
forever as an example and an inspiration, to spur
tis on so that we may not fall below the level
reached by our fathers. The rough, strong poet
of democracy has sung of Grant as " the man of
mighty days, and equal to the days." The days
are less mighty now, and that is all the more
reason why we should show ourselves equal to
them. We meet here to pay glad homage to the
memory of our iUtistrious dead; but let us keep
ever clear before our minds the fact that mere
lip-loyalty is no loyalty at all, and that the only
homage that coimts is the homage of deeds, not
of words. It is but an idle waste of time to
celebrate the memory of the dead tmless we, the
living, in our lives strive to show ourselves not
unworthy of them. If the careers of Washington
and Grant are not vital and full of meaning to us,
if they are merely part of the storied past, and stir
us to no eager emulation in the ceaseless, endless
war for right against wrong, then the root of right
thinking is not in us ; and where we do not think
right we cannot act right.

It is not my ptupose in this address to sketch,
in even the briefest manner, the life and deeds of

204 The Strenuous Life

Grant. It is not even my purpose to touch on
the points where his influence has told so tre-
mendously in the making of our history. It is
part of the man's greatness that now we can use
his career purely for illustration. We can take
for granted the fact that each American who
knows the history of the coimtry mtist know the
history of this man, at least in its broad outline;
and that we no more need to explain Vicksbtirg
and Appomattox than we need to explain York-
town. I shall ask attention, not to Grant's life,
but to the lessons taught by that life as we of
to-day should leam them.

Foremost of all is the lesson of tenacity, of
stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies
there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but none
with his iron determination. This quality he
showed as President no less than as general. He
was no more to be influenced by a hostile majority
in Congress into abandoning his attitude in favor
of a sotind and stable currency than he was to be
influenced by check or repulse into releasing his
grip on beleaguered Richmond. It is this element
of imshakable strength to which we are apt
specially to refer when we praise a man in the
simplest and most effective way, by praising him
as a man. It is the one quality which we can
least afford to lose. It is the only quality the
lack of which is as tmpardonable in the nation as

Grant 105

in the man. It is the antithesis of levity, fickle-
ness, volatiUty, of undue exaltation, of undue
depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all
their myriad forms. The lesson of imyielding,
unflinching, imfaltering perseverance in the course
upon which the nation has entered is one very
necessary for a generation whose preachers some-
times dwell overmuch on the policies of the
moment. There are not a few public men, not a
few men who try to mold opinion within G^ngress
and without, on the stump and in the daily press,
who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and
thereby increase the thirst for overstatement of
each situation as it arises, whose effort is, accord-
ingly, to make the people move in zigzags instead
of in a straight line. We all saw this in the
Spanish war, when the very men who at one time
branded as traitors everybody who said there was
anything wrong in the army at another time
branded as traitors everybody who said there was
anything right. Of course such an attitude is as
uiJiealthy on one side as on the other, and it is
equally destructive of any effort to do away with
abuse.

Hysterics of this kind may have all the re-
sults of extreme timidity. A nation that has not
the power of endurance, the power of dogged
insistence on a determined policy, come weal
or woe, has lost one chief element of greatness.

2o6 The Strenuous Life

The people who wish to abandon the Philippines
because we have had heavy skirmishing out there,
or who think that our rule is a failure whenever
they discover some sporadic upgrowth of evil,
would do well to remember the two long years of
disaster this nation suffered before the July morn-
ing when the news was flashed to the waiting
millions that Vicksburg had fallen in the West
and that in the East the splendid soldiery of Lee
had recoiled at last from the low hills of Gettys-
btirg. Even after this nearly two years more
were to pass before the end came at Appomattox.
Throughout this time the cry of the prophets of
disaster never ceased. The peace-at-any-price
men never wearied of declaiming against the war,
of describing the evils of conquest and subjuga-
tion as worse than any possible benefits that
could result therefrom. The hysterical minority
passed alternately from imreasoning confidence
to imreasoning despair; and at times they even
infected for the moment many of their sober,
steady coimtrymen. Eighteen months after the
war began the state and congressional elections
went heavily against the war party, and two
years later the opposition party actually waged
the Presidential campaign on the issue that the
war was a failure. Meanwhile there was plenty
of bltmdering at the front, plenty of mistakes at
Washington. The cotmtry was saved by the

Grant 207

fact that otir people, as a whole, were steadfast
and unshaken. Both at Washington and at the
front the leaders were men of undaunted reso-
lution, who would not abandon the policy to
which the nation was definitely committed, who
regarded disaster as merely a spur to fresh effort,
who saw in each blunder merely something to be
retrieved, and not a reason for abandoning the
long-determined course. Above all, the great
mass of the people possessed a tough and stub-
bom fiber of character.

There was then, as always, ample xx>om for
criticism, and there was every reason why the
mistakes should be corrected. But in the long
nm our gratitude was due primarily, not to the
critics, not to the fault-finders, but to the men
who actually did the work; not to the men of
negative policy, but to those who struggled
toward the given goal. Merciful oblivion has
swallowed up the names of those who railed at
the men who were saving the Union, while it
has given us the memory of these same men as a
heritage of honor forever; and brightest among
their names flame those of Lincoln and Grant,
the steadfast, the unswerving, the enduring, the
finally triiunphant.

Grant's supreme virtue as a soldier was his
doggedness, the quality which foimd expression
in his famotis phrases of " tmconditional sur-

ao8 The Strenuous Life

tender" and "fighting it out on this line if it
takes all stimmer." He was a master of strategy
and tactics, but he was also a master of hard
hitting, of that "continuous hammering" which
finally broke through even Lee's guard. While
an armed foe was in the field, it never occurred to
Grant that any question cotdd be so important
as his overthrow. He felt nothing but impatient
contempt for the weak souls who wished to hold
parley with the enemy while that enemy was still
capable of resistance.

There is a fine lesson in this to the people who
have been asking us to invite the certain destruc-
tion of our power in the Philippines, and therefore
the certain destruction of the islands themselves,
by putting any concession on our part ahead of
the duty of reducing the islands to quiet at all
costs and of stamping out the last embers of
armed resistance. At the time of the Civil War
the only way to secure peace was to fight for it,
and it wotdd have been a crime against hiunanity
to have stopped fighting before peace was con-
quered. So in the far less important, but still
very important, crisis which confronts us to-day,
it would be a crime against humanity if, whether
from weakness or from mistaken sentimentalism,
we failed to perceive that in the Philippines the
all-important duty is to restore order; because
peace, and the gradually increasing measxire of

Grant S09

self-government for the islands which will follow
peace, can only come when armed resistance has
completely vanished.

Grant was no brawler, no lover of fighting for
fighting's sake. He was a plain, quiet man, not
seeking for glory ; but a man who, when aroused,
was always in deadly earnest, and who never
shrank from duty. He was slow to strike, but
he never struck softly. He was not in the least
of the type which gets up mass-meetings, makes
inflanmiatory speeches or passes inflammatory
resolutions, and then permits over-forcible talk
to be followed by over-feeble action. His promise
squared with his performance. His deeds made
good his words. He did not denotmce an evil in
strained and hyperbolic language; but when he
did denotmce it, he strove to make his dentmcia-
tion effective by his action. He did not plunge
lightly into war, but once in, he saw the war
through, and when it was over, it was over
entirely. Unsparing in battle, he was very merci-
ftil in victory. There was no let-up in his grim
attack, his grim pursuit, xmtil the last body of
armed foes surrendered. But that feat once ac-
compUshed, his first thought was for the valiant
defeated; to let them take back their horses to
their little homes because they wotild need them
to work on their farms. Grant, the champion
whose sword was sharpest in the great fight for
14

2XO The Strenuous Life

liberty, was no less sternly insistent upon the
need of order and of obedience to law. No
stouter foe of anarchy in every form ever lived
within our borders. The man who more than any
other, save Lincoln, had changed us into a nation
whose citizens were all freemen, realized entirely
that these freemen would remain free only while
they kept mastery over their own evil passions.
He saw that lawlessness in all its forms was the
handmaiden of tyranny. No nation ever yet
retained its freedom for any length of time after
losing its respect for the law, after losing the law-
abiding spirit, the spirit that really makes orderly
liberty.

Grant, in short, stood for the great elementary
virtues, for justice, for freedom, for order, for
unyielding resolution, for manliness in its broadest
and highest sense. His greatness was not so much
greatness of intellect as greatness of character,
including in the word ** character" all the strong,
virile virtues. It is character that counts in a
nation as in a man. It is a good thing to have
a keen, fine intellectual development in a nation,
to produce orators, artists, successful business
men ; but it is an infinitely greater thing to have
those solid qualities which we group together
under the name of character — sobriety, steadfast-
ness, the sense of obligation toward one's neighbor
and one's God, hard common sense, and, com-

Grant an

bined with it, the lift of generous enthusiasm
toward whatever is right. These are the qualities
which go to make up true national greatness, and
these were the qualities which Grant possessed in
an eminent degree.

We have come here, then, to realize what the
mighty dead did for the nation, what the dead
did for us who are now living. Let us in retiun
try to shape our deeds so that the America of the
future shall justify by her career the lives of the
great men of her past. Every man who does his
duty as a soldier, as a statesman, or as a private
citizen is paying to Grant's memory the kind of
homage that is best worth paying. We have
difficulties and dangers enough in the present,
and it is the way we face them which is to deter-
mine whether or not we are fit descendants of the
men of the mighty past. We must not flinch
from our duties abroad merely because we have
even more important duties at home. That these
home duties are the most important of all every
thinking man will freely acknowledge. We must
do our duty to ourselves and our brethren in the
complex social life of the time. We must possess
the spirit of broad humanity, deep charity, and
loving-kindness for our fellow-men, and must
remember, at the same time, that this spirit is
really the absolute antithesis of mere sentimen-
talism, of soup-kitchen, pauperizing philanthropy.

8X2 The Strenuous Life

and of legislation which is inspired either by foolish
mock benevolence or by class greed or class hate.
We need to be possessed of the spirit of justice
and of the spirit which recognizes in work and
not ease the proper end of effort.

Of course the all-important thing to keep in
mind is that if we have not both strength and
virtue we shall fail. Indeed, in the old accepta-
tion of the word, virtue included strength and
courage, for the clear-sighted men at the dawn
of our era knew that the passive virtues could not
by themselves avail, that wisdom without courage
would sink into mere cimning, and courage with-
out morality into ruthless, lawless, self -destructive
ferocity. The iron Roman made himself lord of
the world because to the courage of the barbarian
he opposed a courage as fierce and an infinitely
keener mind ; while his civilized rivals, the keen-
witted Greek and Carthaginian, though of even
finer intellect, had let corruption eat into their
brilliant civilizations tmtil their strength had been
corroded as if by acid. In short, the Roman had
character as well as masterftil genius, and when
pitted against peoples either of less genius or of
less character, these peoples went down.

As the ages roll by, the eternal problem forever
fronting each man and each race forever shifts its
outward shape, and yet at the bottom it is always
the same. There are dangers of peace and

Grant

aij

dangers of war; dangers of excess in militarism
and of excess by the avoidance of duty that
implies militarism; dangers of slow dry-rot, and
dangers which become acute only in great crises.
When these crises come, the nation will triumph
or sink accordingly as it produces or fails to
produce statesmen like Lincoln and soldiers like
Grant, and accordingly as it does or does not
back them in their efforts. We do not need men
of tmsteady brilliancy or erratic power — ^unbal-
anced men. The men we need are the men of
strong, earnest, solid character — ^the men who
possess the homely virtues, and who to these
virtues add rugged courage, rugged honesty, and
high resolve. Grant, with his self -poise, his self-
command, his self-mastery; Grant, who loved
peace and did not fear war, who wotild not draw
the sword if he could honorably keep it sheathed,
but who, when once he had drawn it, wotild not
return it to the sheath until the weary years had
brought the blood-won victory ; Grant, who had
no thought after the fight was won save of leading
the life led by other Americans, and who aspired
to the Presidency only as Zachary Taylor or
Andrew Jackson had aspired to it — Grant was of
a type upon which the men of to-day can well
affoid to model themselves.

As I have already said, our first duty, otar most
important work, is setting our own house in order.

2X4 The Strenuous Life

We must be true to ourselves, or else, in the long
run, we shall be false to all others. The republic
cannot stand if honesty and decency do not pre-
vail alike in public and private life ; if we do not set
ourselves seriously at work to solve the tremen-
dous social problems forced upon us by the far-
sweeping industrial changes of the last two genera-
tions. But in considering the life of Grant it is pe-
culiariy appropriate to remember that, besides the
regeneration in political and social life within our
own borders, we must also face what has come
upon us from without. No friendliness with other
nations, no good will for them or by them, can
take the place of national self-reliance. No alli-
ance, no inoffensive conduct on our part, wotild
supply, in time of need, the failure in ability to
hold our own with the strong hand. We must
work out our own destiny by our own strength.
A vigorous young nation like otirs does not always
stand still. Now and then there comes a time when
it is sure either to shrink or to expand. Grant
saw to it that we did not shrink, and therefore we
had to expand when the inevitable moment came.
Great duties face us in the islands where the
Stars and Stripes now float in place of the arro-
gant flag of Spain. As we perform those duties
well or ill, so will we, in large part, determine our
right to a place among the great nations of the
earth. We have got to meet them in the very

Grant ^215

spirit of Grant. If we are frightened at the task,
above all, if we are cowed or disheartened by any
check, or by the clamor of the sensation-monger,
we shall show ourselves weaklings unfit to invoke
the memories of the stalwart men who fought to
a finish the great Civil War. If we do not rule
wisely, and if our rule is not in the interest of the
peoples who have come under our guardianship,
then we had best never to have begun the effort
at all. As a nation we shall have to choose our
representatives in these islands as carefully as
Grant chose the generals who were to serve at
the vital points under him. Fortimately, so far
the choice has been most wise. No nation has
ever sent a better man than we sent to Cuba when
President McKinley appointed as governor-general
of that island Leonard Wood ; and now, in sending
Judge Taft at the head of the commission to the
Philippines, the President has again chosen the
very best man to be found in all the United States
for the purpose in view.

Part of Grant's great strength lay in the fact
that he faced facts as they were, and not as he
wished they might be. He was not originally an
abolitionist, and he probably could not originally
have defined his views as to State sovereignty ;
but when the Civil War was on, he saw that the
only thing to do was to fight it to a finish and
establish by force of arms the constitutional right

ai6 The Strenuous Life

to put down rebellion. It is jiist the same thing
nowadays with expansion. It has come, and it
has come to stay, whether we wish it or not.
Certain duties have fallen to us as a legacy of the
war with Spain, and we cannot avoid performing
them. All we can decide is whether we will
perform them well or ill. We cannot leave the
Philippines. We have got to stay there, estab-
lish order, and then give the inhabitants as much
self-government as they show they can use to
advantage. We cannot run away if we would.
We have got to see the work through, because
we are not a nation of weaklings. We are strong
men, and we intend to do our duty.

To do our duty — that is the stim and substance
of the whole matter. We are not trying to win
glory. We are not trying to do anything espe-
cially brilliant or unusual. We are setting our-
selves vigorously at each task as the task arises,
and we are trying to face each difficulty as Grant
faced inntimerable and infinitely greater diffi-
culties. The sure way to succeed is to set about
our work in the spirit that marked the great
soldier whose life we this day celebrate: the
spirit of devotion to duty, of determination to
deal fairiy, justly, and feariessly with all men,
and of iron resolution never to abandon any task
once begun xmtil it has been brought to a suc-
cessful and tritunphant conclusion.

THE TWO AMERICAS

Speech at the Formal Opening op the Pan-American
£xposiTiON| BuffalOi May 20, 1901

•17

CHAPTER XIV.

THE TWO AMERICAS.

TO-DAY we formally open this great exposi-
tion by the shores of the mighty inland
seas of the North, where all the peoples of
the western hemisphere have joined to show
what they have done in art, science, and indus-
trial invention, what they have been able to
accomplish with their manifold resources and
their infinitely varied individual and national
qualities. Such an exposition, held at the open-
ing of this new century, inevitably suggests two
trains of thought. It should make us think
seriously and solemnly of our several duties to
one another as citizens of the different nations of
this western hemisphere, and also of our duties
each to the nation to which he personally belongs.
The century upon which we have just entered
must inevitably be one of tremendous tritimph
or of tremendous failure for the whole human
race, because, to an infinitely greater extent than
ever before, humanity is knit together in all its
parts, for weal or woe. All about us there are
inntimerable tendencies that tell for good, and
inntimerable tendencies that tell for evil. It is,
of course, a mere truism to say that our own acts
must determine which set of tendencies shall over-

219

220 The Strenuous Life

come the other. In order to act wisely we must
first see clearly. There is no place among us for
the mere pessimist ; no man who looks at life with
a vision that sees all things black or gray can do
aught healthful in molding the destiny of a
mighty and vigorous people. But there is just
as little use for the f ooUsh optimist who refuses
to face the many and real evils that exist, and
who fails to see that the only way to instu^ the
tritimph of righteousness in the futtu^ is to war
against all that is base, weak, and tmlovely in
the present.

There are certain things so obvious as to seem
commonplace, which, nevertheless, must be kept
constantly before us if we are to preserve our
just sense of proportion. This twentieth centtuy
is big with the fate of the nations of mankind,
because the fate of each is now interwoven with
the fate of all to a degree never even approached
in any previous stage of history. No better proof
could be given than by this very exposition. A
century ago no such exposition could have even
been thought of. The larger part of the terri-
tory represented here to-day by so many free
nations was not even mapped, and very much
of it was unknown to the hardiest explorer. The
influence of America upon Old World affairs was
imponderable. World politics still meant Euro-
pean politics.

The Two Americas sax

All that is now changed, not merely by what
has happened here in America, but by what has
happened elsewhere. It is not necessary for us
here to consider the giant changes which have
come elsewhere in the globe; to treat of the rise
in the South Seas of the great free common-
wealths of Australia and New Zealand; of the
way in which Japan has been rejuvenated and
has advanced by leaps and botmds to a position
among the leading civilized powers ; of the prob-
lems, affecting the major portion of mankind,
which call imperiously for solution in parts of the
Old Worid which, a century ago, were barely
known to Europe, even by rumor. Our present
concern is not with the Old World, but with our
own western hemisphere, America. We meet
to-day, representing the people of this continent,
from the Dominion of Canada in the north, to
Chile and the Argentine in the south ; representing
peoples who have traveled far and fast in the last
century, because in them has been practically
shown that it is the spirit of adventure which is
the maker of commonwealths; peoples who are
learning and striving to put in practice the vital
truth that freedom is the necessary first step, but
only the first step, in successful free government.

During the last century we have on the whole
made long strides in the right direction, but
we have very much yet to learn. We all look

222 The Strenuous Life

forward to the day when there shall be a nearer
approximation than there has ever yet been to
the brotherhood of man and the peace of the
world. More and more we are learning that to
love one's country above all others is in no way
incompatible with respecting and wishing well to
all others, and that, as between man and man,
so between nation and nation, there shotild live
the great law of right. These are the goals toward
which we strive; and let us at least earnestly
endeavor to realize them here on this continent.
From Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan, we,
the men of the two Americas, have been con-
quering the wilderness, carving it into state and
province, and seeking to build up in state and
province governments which shall combine indus-
trial prosperity and moral well-being. Let us
ever most vividly remember the falsity of the
belief that any one of us is to be permanently
benefited by the hurt of another. Let us strive
to have our public men treat as axiomatic the
truth that it is for the interest of every common-
wealth in the western hemisphere to see every
other commonwealth grow in riches and in happi-
ness, in material wealth and in the sober, strong,
self-respecting manliness, without which material
wealth avails so little.

To-day on behalf of the United States I welcome
you here — you, our brothers of the North, and

The Two Americas ms

you, OUT brothers of the South ; we wish you well ;
we wish you all prosperity; and we say to you
that we earnestly hope for your well-being, not
only for your own sakes, but also for our own,
for it is a benefit to each of us to have the others
do well. The relations between us now are those
of cordial friendship, and it is to the interest of all
alike that this friendship should ever remain
unbroken. Nor is there the least chance of its
being broken, provided only that all of us alike
act with full recognition of the vital need that
each should realize that his own interests can
best be served by serving the interests of others.

You, men of Canada, are doing substantially
the same work that we of this republic are doing,
and face substantially the same problems that we
also face. Yours is the worid of the merchant,
the manufacturer and mechanic, the farmer, the
ranchman, and the miner; you are subduing the
prairie and the forest, tilling farm-land, building
cities, striving to raise ever higher the standard
of right, to bring ever nearer the day when true
justice shall obtain between man and man; and
we wish Godspeed to you and yours, and may the
kindliest ties of good will always exist between us.

To you of the republics south of us, I wish to
say a special word. I believe with all my heart
in the Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine is not to
be invoked for the aggrandizement of any one of

M4 The Strenuous Life

us here on this continent at the expense of any one
else on this continent. It should be regarded
yamply as a great international Pan-American
\. policy, vital to the interests of all of us. The
United States has, and ought to have, and must
ever have, only the desire to see her sister com-
monwealths in the western hemisphere continue
to flourish, and the determination that no Old
Worid power shall acquire new territory here on
this western continent. We of the two Americas
must be left to work out otu* own salvation along
our own lines ; and if we are wise we will make it
tmderstood as a cardinal feature of otu* joint
foreign policy that, on the one hand, we will not
submit to territorial aggrandizement on this con-
tinent by any Old Worid power, and that, on the
other hand, among ourselves each nation must
scrupulously regard the rights and interests of
the others, so that, instead of any one of us com-
mitting the criminal folly of trying to rise at the
expense of our neighbors, we shall all strive
upward in honest and manly brotherhood, shoul-
der to shoulder.

A word now especially to my own fellow-
countrymen. I think that we have all of us
reason to be satisfied with the showing made in
this exposition, as in the great expositions of the
past, of the results of the enterprise, the shrewd
daring, the business energy and capacity, and the

The Two Americas 22$

artistic and, above all, the wonderftil mechanical
skill and inventiveness of our people. In all of
this we have legitimate cause to feel a noble
pride, and a still nobler pride in the showing
made of what we have done in such matters as
our system of widespread popular education and
in the field of philanthropy, especially in that
best kind of philanthropy which teaches each
man to help lift both himself and his neighbor
by joining with that neighbor hand in hand in a
common effort for the common good.

But we should err greatly, we should err in the
most fatal of ways, by wilful blindness to what-
ever is not pleasant, if, while justly proud of our
achievements, we failed to realize that we have
plenty of shortcomings to remedy, that there are
terrible problems before us, which we must work
out right, under the gravest national penalties if
we fail. It cannot be too often repeated that
there is no patent device for securing good gov-
ernment; that after all is said and done, after
we have given full credit to every scheme for
increasing our material prosperity, to every effort
of the lawmaker to provide a system under which
each man shall be best secured in his own rights, it
yet remains true that the great factor in working
out the success of this giant republic of the
western continent must be the possession of those
qualities of essential virtue and essential manliness

226 The Strenuous Life

which have built up every great and mighty peo-
ple of the past, and the lack of which always
has brought, and always will bring, the proudest
of nations crashing down to ruin. Here in this
exposition, on the stadium and on the pylons of
the bridge, you have written certain sentences
to which we all must subscribe, and to which
we must live up if we are in any way or measure
to do otu" duty: " Who shims the dust and sweat
of the contest, on his brow falls not the cool
shade of the olive," and ** A free state exists only
in the virtue of the citizen." We all accept these
statements in theory; but if we do not hve up
to them in practice, then there is no health in us.
Take the two together always. In our eager,
restless life of effort, but little can be done by
that cloistered virtue of which Milton spoke with
such fine contempt. We need the rough, strong
qualities that make a man fit to play his part well
among men. Yet we need to remember even
more that no ability, no strength and force, no
power of intellect or power of wealth, shall avail
us, if we have not the root of right living in us ;
if we do not pay more than a mere lip-loyalty to
the old, old commonplace virtues, which stand at
the f otmdation of all social and political well-being.
It is easy to say what we ought to do, but it is
hard to do it ; and yet no scheme can be devised
which will save us from the need of doing just

The Two Americas 227

this hard work. Not merely must each of us
strive to do his duty; in addition it is impera-
tively necessary also to establish a strong and
intelligent public opinion which will require each
to do his duty. If any man here falls short he
should not only feel ashamed of himself, but in
some way he ought also to be made conscious of
the condemnation of his fellows, and this no
matter what form his shortcoming takes. Doing
our duty is, of course, incumbent on every one of
us alike; yet the heaviest blame for dereliction
should fall on the man who sins against the light,
the man to whom much has been given, and from
whom, therefore, we have a right to expect much
in return. We should hold to a peculiarly rigid
accountability those men who in public life, or
as editors of great papers, or as owners of vast
fortunes, or as leaders and molders of opinion in
the pulpit, or on the platform, or at the bar, are
guilty of wrong-doing, no matter what form that
wrong-doing may take.

In addition, however, to the problems which,
under Protean shapes, are yet fundamentally the
same for all nations and for all times, there are
others which especially need our attention,
because they are the especial productions of our
present industrial civilization. The tremendous
industrial development of the nineteenth centiuy
has not only conferred great benefits upon us of

228 The Strenuous Life

the twentieth, but it has also exposed tis to grave
dangers. This highly complex movement has had
many sides, some good and some bad, and has
produced an absolutely novel set of phenomena.
To secure from them the best results will tax to the
utmost the resources of the statesman, the econo-
mist, and the social reformer. There has been
an immense relative growth of urban population,
and, in consequence, an immense growth of the
body of wage-workers, together with an accumu-
lation of enormous fortunes which more and more
tend to express their power through great cor-
porations that are themselves guided by some
master mind of the business world. As a result,
we are confronted by a formidable series of per-
plexing problems, with which it is absolutely
necessary to deal, and yet with which it is not
merely useless, but in the highest degree unwise
and dangerous to deal, save with wisdom, insight,
and self-restraint.

There are certain truths which are so conunon-
place as to be axiomatic; and yet so important
that we cannot keep them too vividly before our
minds. The true welfare of the nation is indis-
solubly botmd up with the welfare of the farmer
and the wage-worker — of the man who tills the
soil, and of the mechanic, the handicraftsman,
the laborer. If we can insure the prosperity of
these two classes we need not trouble oiirselves

The Two Americas 229

about the prosperity of the rest, for that will
follow as a matter of course.

On the other hand, it is equally true that the
prosperity of any of us can best be attained by
measures that will promote the prosperity of all.
The poorest motto upon which an American can
act is the motto of **some men down," and the
safest to follow is that of "all men up." A good
deal can and ought to be done by law. For
instance, the State and, if necessary, the nation
should by law assume ample power of supervising
and regulating the acts of any corporation (which
can be but its creattu-e), and generally of those
immense business enterprises which exist only
because of the safety and protection to property
guaranteed by our system of government. Yet
it is equally true that, while this power should
exist, it should be used sparingly and with self-
restraint. Modem industrial competition is very
keen between nation and nation, and now that
our country is striding forward with the pace of
a giant to take the leading position in the inter-
national industrial world, we should beware how
we fetter our limbs, how we cramp our Titan
strength. While striving to prevent industrial
injustice at home, we must not bring upon our-
selves industrial weakness abroad. This is a task
for which we need the finest abilities of the states-
man, the student, the patriot, and the far-seeing

aso The Strenuous Life

lover of mankind. It is a task in which we shall
fail with absolute certainty if we approach it after
having surrendered ourselves to the guidance of
the demagogue, or the doctrinaire, of the well-
meaning man who thinks feebly, or of the cunning
self-seeker who endeavors to rise by committing
that worst of crimes against our people — ^the
crime of inflaming brother against brother, one
American against his fellow-Americans.

My fellow-countrymen, bad laws are evil things,
good laws are necessary; and a clean, fearless,
common-sense administration of the laws is even
more necessary; but what we need most of all
is to look to our own selves to see that our con-
sciences as individuals, that our collective national
conscience, may respond instantly to every appeal
for high action, for lofty and generous endeavor.
There must and shall be no falling off in the
national traits of hardihood and manliness; and
we must keep ever bright the love of justice, the
spirit of strong brotherly friendship for one's
fellows, which we hope and believe wUl hereafter
stand as typical of the men who make up this,
the mightiest republic upon which the sun has
ever shone.

MANHOOD AND STATEHOOD

Address at the Quarter-Centennial Celebration ov

Statehood in Colorado, at Colorado Springs,

August 2, igoz

33X

CHAPTER XV.

MANHOOD AND STATBHOOD.

THIS anniversary, which marks the comple-
tion by Colorado of her first quarter-cen-
tury of statehood, is of interest not only to
her sisters, the States of the Rocky Mountain
region, but to our whole cotmtry. With the ex-
ception of the admission to statehood of Calif omia,
no other event emphasized in such dramatic fash-
ion the full meaning of the growth of otir country
as did the incoming of Colorado.

It is a law of our intellectual development that
the greatest and most important truths, when once
we have become thoroughly familiar with them,
often because of that very familiarity grow dim in
our minds. The westward spread of our people
across this continent has been so rapid, and so
great has been their success in taming the rugged
wilderness, turning the gray desert into green fer-
tility, and filling the waste and lonely places with
the eager, thronging, crowded life of our industrial
civilization, that we have begun to accept it all as
part of the orderof nattu-e. Moreover, it now seems
to us equally a matter of course that when a suf-
ficient ntunber of the citizens of our common coun-
try have thus entered into and taken possession

S33

234 The Strenuous Life

of some great tract of empty wildemess, they
shoiild be permitted to enter the Union as a State
on an absolute equality with the older States,
having the same right both to manage their own
local affairs as they deem best, and to exercise their
full share of control over all the affairs of whatever
kind or sort in which the nation is interested as a
whole. The yotmgest and the oldest States stand
on an exact level in one indissoluble and perpetual
Union.

To us nowadays these processes seem so natural
that it is only by a mental wrench that we con-
ceive of any other as possible. Yet they are really
wholly modem and of purely American develop-
ment. When, a century before Colorado became
a State, the original thirteen States began the great
experiment of a free and independent republic on
this continent, the processes which we now accept
in such matter-of-course fashion were looked upon

<as abnormal and revolutionary. It is our own suc-
cess here in America that has brought about the
complete alteration in feeling. The chief factor in
producing the Revolution, and later in producing
the War of 1812, was the inability of the mother-
country to tmderstand that the freemen who went
forth to conquer a continent should be encouraged
in that work, and could not and ought not to be
expected to toil only for the profit or glory of
others. When the first Continental Congress

Manhood and Statehood 235

assembled, the British government, like every
other government of Europe at that time, simply
did not know how to look upon the general ques-
tion of the progress of the colonies save from the
standpoint of the people who had stayed at home.
The spread of the hardy, venturesome backwoods-
men was to most of the statesmen of London a
matter of anxiety rather than of pride, and the
famous Quebec Act of 1774 was in part designed
with the purpose of keeping the English-speaking
settlements permanently east of the Alleghanies,
and preserving the mighty and beautiful valley
of the Ohio as a hunting-grotmd for savages, a
preserve for the great fur-trading companies ; and
as late as 181 2 this project was partially revived.

More extraordinary still, even after independ-
ence was achieved, and a firm Union accom-
plished under that wonderful document, the Con-
stitution adopted in 1789, we still see traces of
the same feeling lingering here and there in our
own cotmtry. There were plenty of men in the
seaboard States who looked with what seems to
us ludicrous apprehension at the steady westward
growth of our people. Grave senators and repre-
sentatives expressed dire foreboding as to the ruin
which would result from admitting the communi-
ties growing up along the Ohio to a full equality
with the older States; and when Louisiana was
given statehood, they insisted that that very fact

336 The Strenuous Life

dissolved the Union . When our people had begun
to settle in the Mississippi valley, Jefferson himself
accepted with eqiianiniity the view that probably
it would not be possible to keep regions so infi-
nitely remote as the Mississippi and the Atlantic
coast in the same Union. Later even such a
stanch Union man and firm believer in Western
g^o^vth as fearless old Tom Benton of Missoiiri
thought that it would be folly to try to extend the
national limits westward of the Rocky Motmtains.
In 1830 our then best-known man of letters and
historian, Washington Irving, prophesied that for
ages to come the country upon which we now
stand would be inhabited simply by roving tribes
of nomads.

The mental attitude of all these good people
need not surprise anybody. There was nothing
in the past by which to judge either the task
before this country, or the way in which that task
was to be done. As Lowell finely said, on this
continent we have made new States as Old World
men pitch tents. Even the most far-seeing states-
men, those most gifted with the imagination
needed by really great statesmen, could not at
first grasp what the process really meant. Slowly
and with incredible labor the backwoodsmen of
the old colonies hewed their way through the
dense forests from the tide- water region to the
crests of the Alleghanies. But by the time the

Manhood and Statehood 237

Alleghanies were reached, about at the moment
when our national life began, the movement had
gained wonderful momentum. Thenceforward it
advanced by leaps and botmds, and the frontier
pushed westward across the continent with ever-
increasing rapidity until the day came when it
vanished entirely. Our greatest statesmen have
always been those who believed in the nation —
who had faith in the power of our people to spread
imtil they should become the mightiest among the
peoples of the world.

Under any governmental system which was
known to Europe, the problem offered by the
westward thrust, across a continent, of so master-
ful and liberty-loving a race as ours would have
been insoluble. The great civilized and colonizing
races of antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans,
had been utterly tmable to devise a scheme under
which when their race spread it might be possible
to preserve both national tmity and local and indi-
vidual freedom. When a Hellenic or Latin city
sent off a colony, one of two things happened.
Either the colony was kept in political subjection
to the city or state of which it was an offshoot, or
else it became a wholly independent and alien, and
often a hostile, nation. Both systems werefraught
with disaster. With the Greeks race tmity was
sacrificed to local independence, and a& k result
the Greek world became the easy prey of foreign

238 The Strenuous Life

conquerors. The Romans kept national tinity,
but only by means of a crushing centralized des-
potism.

When the modem world entered upon the mar-
velous era of expansion which began with the
discoveries of Columbus, the nations were able to
devise no new plan. All the great colonizing
powers, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Hol-
land, and Russia, managed their colonies pri-
marily in the interest of the home country. Some
did better than others, — England probably best
and Spain worst, — ^but in no case were the colonists
treated as citizens of equal rights in a common
coimtry. Our ancestors, who were at once the
strongest and the most liberty-loving among all
the peoples who had been thrust out into new con-
tinents, were the first to revolt against this system ;
and the lesson taught by their success has been
thoroughly learned.

In applying the new principles to our conditions
we have foimd the Federal Constitution a nearly
perfect instrument. The system of a closely knit
and indestructible imion of free commonwealths
has enabled us to do what neither Greek nor
Roman in their greatest days could do. We have
preserved the complete tmity of an expanding race
without impairing in the slightest degree the lib-
erty of the individual. When in a given locality
the settlers became sufficiently numeroxis, they

Manhood and Statehood 239

were admitted to statehood, and thenceforward
shared all the rights and all the duties of the citi-
zens of the older States. As with Columbus and
the egg, the expedient seems obvious enough now-
adays ; but then it was so novel that a couple of
generations had to pass before we oiirselves thor-
oughly grasped all its features. At last we grew
to accept as axiomatic the two facts of national
union and local and personal freedom. As what-
ever is axiomatic seems commonplace, we now
tend to accept what has been accomplished as a
mere matter-of-course incident, of no great mo-
ment. The very completeness with which the
vitally important task has been done almost blinds
us to the extraordinary nature of the achievement.
You, the men of Colorado, and, above all, the
older among those whom I am now addressing,
have been engaged in doing the great typical work
of our people. Save only the preservation of the
Union itself, no other task has been so important
as the conquest and settlement of the West. This
conquest and settlement has been the stupendous
feat of our race for the century that has just closed.
It stands supreme among all such feats. The
same kind of thing has been in Australia and
Canada, but upon a less important scale, while
the Russian advance in Siberia has been incom-
parably slower. In all the history of mankind
there is nothing that quite parallels the way in

S40 The Strenuous Life

which our people have filled a v acant continent
with self-governing commonwealSS^ knit into one
nation. And of all this marvelous history perhaps
the most wonderful portion is that which deals
with the way in which the Pacific Coast and the
Rocky Motmtains were settled.

The men who founded these communities
showed practically by their life-work that it is
indeed the spirit of adventure which is the maker
of commonwealths. Their traits of daring and
hardihood and iron endurance are not merely
indispensable traits for pioneers; they are also
traits which must go to the make-up of every
mighty and successful people. You and your
fathers who built up the West did more even than
you thought ; for you shaped thereby the destiny
of the whole republic, and as a necessary corollary
profotmdly influenced the coiu^e of events through-
out the world. More and more as the years go by
this repubUc will find its guidance in the thought
and action of the West, because the conditions of
/development in the West have steadily tended to
accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics
of its people.

There was scant room for the coward and the
weakling in the ranks of the adventurous frontiers-
men — the pioneer settlers who first broke up the
wild prairie soil, who first hewed their way into the
primeval forest, who guided their white-topped

Manhood and Statehood 241

wagons across the endless leagues of Indian-
hatinted desolation, and explored every remote
motintain-chain in the restless quest for metal
wealth. Behind them came the men who com-
pleted the work they had roughly begun: who
drove the great railroad systems over plain and
desert and mountain pass ; who stocked the teem-
ing ranches, and tmder irrigation saw the bright
green of the alfalfa and the yellow of the golden
stubble supplant the gray of the sage-brush desert ;
who have built great populous cities — cities in
which every art and science of civilization are car-
ried to the highest point — on tracts which, when
the nineteenth century had passed its meridian,
were still known only to the grim trappers and
hunters and the red lords of the wilderness with
whom they waged eternal war.

Such is the record of which we are so proud.
It is a record of men who greatly dared and
greatly did; a record of wanderings wider and
more dangerous than those of the Vikings; a
record of endless feats of arms, of victory after
victory in the ceaseless strife waged against wild
man and wild nature. The winning of the West
was the great epic feat in the history of our race.

We have then a right to meet to-day in a spirit
of just pride in the past. But when we pay hom-
age to the hardy, grim, resolute men who, with
incredible toil and risk, laid deep the foundations
16

24* The Strenuous Life.

of the civilization that we inherit, let us steadily
remember that the only homage that counts is the
homage of deeds — not merely of words. It is well
to gather here to show that we remember what has
been done in the past by the Western pioneers of
our people, and that we glory in the greatness for
which they prepared the way. But lip-loyalty by
itself avails very little, whether it is expressed con-
cerning a nation or an ideal. It would be a sad
and evil thing for this cotmtry if ever the day came
when we considered the great deeds of our fore-
fathers as an excuse for our resting slothfully
satisfied with what has been already done. On
the contrary, they should be an inspiration and
appeal, summoning us to show that we too have
courage and strength; that we too are ready to
dare greatly if the need arises ; and, above all, that
we are firmly bent upon that steady performance
of everyday duty which, in the long run, is of such
incredible worth in the formation of national
character.

The old iron days have gone, the days when the
weakling died as the penalty of inability to hold
his own in the rough warfare against his siurotmd-
ings. We live in softer times. Let us see to it
that, while we take advantage of every gentler and
more humanizing tendency of the age, we yet pre-
serve the iron quality which made our forefathers
and predecessors fit to do the deeds they did. It

Manhood and Statehood 343

will of necessity find a different expression now,
but the quality itself remains just as necessary as
ever. Surely you men of the West, you men who
with stout heart, cool head, and ready hand have
wrought out your own success and built up these
great new commonwealths, surely you need no
reminder of the fact that if either man or nation
wishes to play a great part in the world there must
be no dallying with the life of lazy ease. In the
abounding energy and intensity of existence in our
mighty democratic republic there is small space
indeed for the idler, for the luxury-loving man
who prizes ease more than hard, triumph-crowned
effort.

We hold work not as a curse but as a blessing,
and we regard the idler with scornful pity. It
would be in the highest degree undesirable that
we should all work m the same way or at the same
things, and for the sake of the real greatness of
the nation we should in the fullest and most cor-
dial way recognize the fact that some of the most
needed work must, from its very nature, be un-
remunerative in a material sense. Each man
must choose so far as the conditions allow him
the path to which he is bidden by his own peculiar
powers and inclinations. But if he is a man he
must in some way or shape do a man's work. If,
after making all the effort that his strength of
body and of mind permits, he yet honorably f'^ils,

244 The Strenuous Life

why, he is still entitled to a certain share of re-
spect because he has made the effort. But if he
does not make the effort, or if he makes it half-
heartedly and recoils from the labor, the risk, or
the irksome monotony of his task, why, he has
forfeited all right to our respect, and has shown
himself a mere cumberer of the earth. It is not
given to us all to succeed, but it is given to us all
to strive manfully to deserve success.

We need then the iron qualities that must go
with true manhood. We need the positive virtues
of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of
power to do without shrinking the rough work that
must always be done, and to persevere through the
long days of slow progress or of seeming failure
which always come before any final triumph, no
matter how brilliant. But we need more than
these quaUties. This cotmtry cannot afford to
have its sons less than men; but neither can it
afford to have them other than good men. If
courage and strength and intellect are tmaccom-
panied by the moral purpose, the moral sense,
they become merely forms of expression for un-
scrupulous force and tmscrupulous ctinning. If
the strong man has not in him the lift toward
lofty things his strength makes him only a curse
to himself and to his neighbor. All this is true in
private life, and it is no less true in pubUc life. If
Washington and Lincoln had not had in them the

Manhood and Statehood 245

whipcord fiber of moral and mental strength, the
soul that steels itself to endure disaster tmshaken
and with grim resolve to wrest victory from defeat,
then the one could not have founded, nor the other
preserved, our mighty federal Union. The least
touch of flabbiness, of tmhealthy softness, in either
would have meant ruin for this nation, and there-
fore the downfall of the proudest hope of mankind.
But no less is it true that had either been influ-
enced by self-seeking ambition, by callous dis-
regard of others, by contempt for the moral law,
he would have dashed us down into the black gulf
of failtu'e. Woe to all of us if ever as a people we
grow to condone evil because it is successful. We
can no more afford to lose social and civic decency
and honesty than we can afford to lose the quali-
ties of courage and strength. It is the merest
truism to say that the nation rests upon the indi-
vidual, upon the family — upon individual manli-
ness and womanliness, using the words in their
widest and fullest meaning.

To be a good husband or good wife, a good
neighbor and friend, to be hard-working and up-
right in business and social relations, to bring up
many healthy children — ^to be and to do all this
is to lay the fotmdations of good citizenship as
they must be laid. But we cannot stop even with
this. Each of us has not only his duty to himself,
his family, and his neighbors, but his duty to the

346 The Strenuous Life

State and to the nation. We are in honor botind
each to strive according to his or her strength to
bring ever nearer the day when justice and wis-
dom shall obtain in public life as in private life.
We cannot retain the full measure of our self-
respect if we cannot retain pride in our citizenship.
For the sake not only of ourselves but of our chil-
dren and our children's children we must see that
this nation stands for strength and honesty both
at home and abroad. In our internal policy we
cannot afford to rest satisfied tmtil all that the
government can do has been done to secure fair
dealing and equal justice as between man and
man. In the great part which hereafter, whether
we will or pot, we must play in the worid at large,
let us see to it that we neither do wrong nor shrink
from doing right because the right is difficult ; that
on the one hand we inflict no injury, and that on
the other we have a due regard for the honor and
the interest of our mighty nation ; and that we
keep unsullied the renown of the flag which beyond
all others of the present time or of the ages of the
past stands for confident faith in the future welfare
and greatness of mankind.

BROTHERHOOD AND THE
HEROIC VIRTUES

A0DRB88 AT Veterans' Reunion, Burlington, Vermont,
Thursday, September 5, 1901

itf

CHAPTER XVI.

BROTHERHOOD AND THE HEROIC VIRTUES.

I SPEAK to you to-night less as men of Ver-
mont than as members of the Grand Army
which saved the Union. But at the outset
I must pay a special tribute to your State. Ver-
mont was not a rich State, compared with many
States, and she had sent out so many tens of
thousands of her sons to the West that it is not
improbable that as many men of Vermont birth
served in the regiments of other States as in those
of her own State. Yet, notwithstanding this
drain, your gallant State was surpassed by no
other State of the North, either in the ntmiber of
men according to her population which she sent
into the army, or in the relative extent of her
financial support of the war. Too much cannot
be said of the high quality of the Vermont
soldiers ; and one contributing factor in securing
this high quality was the good sense which
continually sent recruits into the already existing
regiments instead of forming new ones.

It is difficult to express the full measure of
obligation under which this cotmtry is to the men
who from *6i to '65 took up the most terrible and
vitally necessary task which has ever fallen to the

^50 The Strenuous Life

lot of any generation of men in the western hemi-
sphere. Other men have rendered great service
to the cotmtry, but the service you rendered was
not merely great — ^it was incalculable. Other men
by their lives or their deaths have kept imstained
our honor, have wrought marvels for our interest,
have led us forward to triumph, or warded off
disaster from us ; other men have marshaled our
ranks upward across the stony slopes of greatness.
But you did more, for you saved us from annihila-
tion. We can feel proud of what others did only
because of what you did. It was given to you,
when the mighty days came, to do the mighty
deeds for which the days called, and if your deeds
had been left undone, all that had been already
accomplished would have turned into apples of
Sodom tmder our teeth. The glory of Washington
and the majesty of Marshall would have crumbled
into meaningless dust if you and your comrades
had not buttressed their work with your strength
of steel, your courage of fire. The Declaration of
Independence would now sotmd like a windy plati-
tude, the Constitution of the United States would
ring as false as if drawn by the Abb6 Sieyfes in the
days of the French Terror, if your stem valor had
not proved the truth of the one and made good the
promise of the other. In our history there have
been other victorious struggles for right, on the
field of battle and in civic strife. To have failed

The Heroic Virtues 251

in these other struggles would have meant bitter
shame and grievous loss. But you fought in the
one struggle where failure meant death and de-
struction to our people; meant that our whole
past history would be crossed out of the records
of successful endeavor with the red and black lines
of f ailiure ; meant that not one man in all this wide
cotmtry would now be holding his head upright as
a free citizen of a mighty and glorious republic.

All this you did, and therefore you are entitled
to the homage of all men who have not forgotten
in their blindness either the awful nature of the
crisis, or the worth of priceless service rendered in
the hour of direst need.

You met a great need, that vanished because
of yotu' success. You have left us many mem-
ories, to be prized forevermore. You have taught
us many lessons, and none more important than
the lesson of brotherhood. The realization of the
tmderlying brotherhood of our people, the feeling
that there should be among them an essential
unity of purpose and sympathy, must be kept close
at heart if we are to do oiu' work well here in our
American life. You have taught us both by what
you did on the tented fields, and by what you have «.
done since in civic life, how this spirit of brother-
hood can be made a living, a vital force.

In the first place, you have left us the right of
brotherhood with the gallant men who wore the

2S2 The Strenuous Life

gray in the ranks against which you were pitted.
At the opening of this new century, all of us, the
children of a reunited country, have a right to
glory in the countless deeds of valor done alike by
the men of the North and the men of the South.
We can retain an ever-growing sense of the all-
importance, not merely to our people but to man-
kind, of the Union victory, while giving the freest
and heartiest recognition to the smcerity and self-

< devotion of those Americans, our fellow-cotmtry-
men, who then fought against the stars in their
courses. Now there is none left. North or South,
Who does not take joy and pride in the Union ; and
when three years ago we once more had to face a
foreign enemy, the heart of every true American
thrilled with pride to see veterans who had fought
in the Confederate uniform once more appear
under Uncle Sam's colors, side by side with their
former foes, and leading to victory tmder the
famous old flag the sons both of those who had
worn the blue and of those who had worn the gray.
But there are other ways in which you have
taught the lesson of brotherhood. In our highly
complex, highly specialized industrial life of to-day
there are many tendencies for good and there are
also many tendencies for evil. Chief among the
latter is the way in which, in great industrial cen-
ters, the segregation of interests invites a segrega-
tion of sympathies. In our old American life, and

The Heroic Virtues 253

in the country districts where to-day the old con-
ditions still largely obtain, there was and is no such
sharp and rigid demarcation between different
groups of citizens. In most country districts at •
the present day not only have the people many/
feelings in common, but, what is quite as impor-'
tant, they are perfectly aware that they have these
feelings in common. In the cities the divergence
of real interests is nothing like as great as is com-
monly supposed ; but it does exist, and, above all,
there is a tendency to fa get or ignore the commu-
nity of interest. Ther-; is comparatively little
neighborliness, and life is so busy and the popula-
tion so crowded that it is impossible for the
average man to get into touch with any of his
fellow-citizens save those in his immediate little
group. In cpnsequence there tends to grow up a
feeling of estrangement between different groups,
of forgetfulness of the great primal needs and
primal passions that are common to all of us.

It is therefore of the utmost benefit to have men
thrown together under circtunstances which force
them to realize their community of interest, espe-
cially where the community of interest arises from
commuAity pf devotion to a lofty ideal. The great
Civil War rendered precisely this service. It drew
into the field a very large proportion of the adult
male population, and it lasted so long that its
lessons were thoroughly driven home. In our

254 The Strenuous Life

other wars the same lessons, or nearly the same
lessons, have been taught, but upon so much
smaller a scale that the effect is in no shape or way
comparable. In the Civil War, merchant and
clerk, manufacturer and mechanic, farmer and
hired man, capitalist and wage-worker, city man
and countryman, Easterner and Westerner, went
into the army together, faced toil and risk and
hardship side by side, died with the same forti-
tude, and felt the same disinterested thrill of
triumph when the victory came. In our modem
life there are only a few occupations where risk
has to be feared, and there are many occupations
where no exhausting labor has to be faced ; and
so there are plenty of us who can be benefited by
a little actual experience with the rough side of
.things. It was a good thing, a very good thing,
to have a great mass of our people learn what it
was to face death and endure toil together, and all
on an exact level. You whom I am now address-
ing remember well, do you not, the weary, foot-
sore marches under the burning sun, when the
blankets seemed too heavy to carry, and then the
shivering sleep in the trenches, when the mud
froze after dark and the blankets seemed altogether
too light instead of too heavy? You remember
the scanty fare, and you remember, above all,
how you got to estimate each of your fellows by
what there was in him and not by anjrthing adven-

The Heroic Virtues 255

titious in his surroundings. It was of vital im-
portance to you that the men on your left and
your right should do their duty; that they should
come forward when the order was to advance;
that they should keep the lines with ceaseless
vigilance and fortitude if on the defensive. You
neither knew nor cared what had been their occu-
pations, or whether they were in worldly ways
well off or" the reverse. What you de^red to
know about them was to be sure that they would
"stay put" when the crisis came. Was not this
so? You know it was.

Moreover, all these qualities of fine heroism and
stubborn endurance were displayed in a spirit of
devotion to a lofty ideal, and not for material gain.
The average man who fought in our armies during
the Civil War could have gained much more money
if he had stayed in civil life. When the end came
his sole reward was to feel that the Union had been
saved, and the flag which had been rent in sunder
once more made whole. Nothing was more note-
worthy than the marvelous way in which, once the
war was ended, the great armies which had fought
it to a triumphant conclusion disbanded, and were
instantly lost in the current of otu: civil life. The
soldier turned at once to the task of earning his
own livelihood. But he carried within him mem-
ories of inestimable benefit to himself, and he
bequeathed to us who come after him the priceless

2s6 The Strenuous Life

heritage of his example. From the major-general
to the private in the ranks each came back to civil
life with the proud consciousness of duty well done,
and all with a feeling of conmiunity of interest
which they could have gained in no other way.
Each knew what work was, what danger was.
Each came back with his own power for labor and
endurance strengthened, and yet with his sym-
pathy for others quickened. From that day to
this the men who fought in the great war have
inevitably had in them a spirit to which appeal
for any lofty cause could be made with the con-
fident knowledge that there would be immediate
and eager response. In the breasts of the men
who saw Appomattox there was no room for the
growth of the jealous, greedy, sullen envy which
•'makes anarchy, which has bred the red Conunune.
They had gone down to the root of things, and
knew how to judge and value, each man his neigh-
bor, whether that neighbor was rich or poor;
neither envying him because of his wealth, nor
despising him because of his poverty.

The lesson taught by the great war could only
be imperfectly taught by any lesser war. Never-
theless, not a little good has been done even by
such struggles as that which ended in insuring
independence to Cuba, and in giving to the Philip-
pines a freedom to which they could never have
attained had we permitted them to fall into anar-

The Heroic Virtues 257

chy or under tyranny. It was a pleasant thing to
see the way in which men came forward from every
walk of life, from every section of the country, as
soon as the call to arms occurred. The need was
small and easily met, and not one in a hundred of
the ardent young fellows who pressed forward to
enter the army had a chance to see any service
whatever. But it was good to see that the spirit
of *6i had not been lost. Perhaps the best feature
of the whole movement was the eagerness with
which men went into the ranks, anxious only to
serve their cotmtry and to do their share of the
work without regard to an)rthing in the way of
reward or position ; for, gentlemen, it is upon the
efficiency of the enlisted man, upon the way he
does his duty, that the efficiency of the whole
army really depends, and the prime work of the
officer is, after all, only to develop, foster, and
direct the good qualities of the men under him.

Well, this rush into the ranks not only had a
very good side, but also at times an amusing side.
I remember one characteristic incident which
occtirred on board one of our naval vessels. Sev-
eral of these vessels were officered and manned
chiefly from the naval militia of the different
States, the commander and executive officer, and
a few veterans here and there among the crew,
being the only ones that came from the regular
service. The naval militia contained every type
»7

258 The Strenuous Life

of man, from bankers with a taste for yachting to
longshoremen, and they all went in and did their
best. But of course it was a little hard for some
of them to adjust themselves to their surrotmd-
ings. One of the vessels in question, toward the
end of the war, returned from the Spanish Main
and anchored in one of our big ports. Early one
morning a hard-looking and seemingly rather
dejected member of the crew was engaged in
" squeegeeing" the quarter-deck, when the captain
came up and, noticing a large and handsome
yacht near by (I shall not use the real name of the
yacht) , remarked to himself : * * I wonder what boat
that is ? " The man with the squeegee touched his
cap and said in answer : * * The Dawn, sir. " * * How
do you know that ? " quoth the captain, looking at
him. ** Because I own her, sir," responded the
man with the squeegee, again touching his cap;
and the conversation ended.

Now, it was a first-rate thing for that man him-
self to have served his trick, not merely as the man
behind the gun, but as the man with the squeegee ;
and it was a mighty good thing for the country
that he should do it. In our volunteer regiments
we had scores of enlisted men of independent
means serving under officers many of whom were
dependent for their daily bread upon the work of
their hands or brain from month to month. It
was a good thing for both classes to be brought

The Heroic Virtues 259

together on such terms. It showed that we of
this generation had not wholly forgotten the lesson
taught by you who fought to a finish the great
Civil War. And there is no danger to the future
of this country just so long as that lesson is remem-
bered in all its bearings, civil and military.

Your history, rightly studied, will teach us the
time-worn truth that in war, as in peace, we need
chiefly the everyday, commonplace virtues, and,
above all, an unflagging sense of duty. Yet in
dwelling upon the lessons for our ordinary conduct
which we can learn from your experience, we must
never forget that it also shows us what should be
our model in times that are not ordinary, in the
times that try men's souls. We need to have
within us the splendid heroic virtues which alone
avail in the mighty crises, the terrible catastrophes
whereby a nation is either purified as if by fire, or
else consumed forever in the flames. When you
of the Civil War sprang forward at Abraham Lin-
coln's call to put all that life holds dear, and life
itself, in the scale with the nation's honor, you
were able to do what you did because you had in
you not only the qualities that make good citizens,
but in addition the high and intense traits, the
deep passion and enthusiasm, which go to make
up those heroes who are fit to deal with iron days.
We can never as a nation afford to forget that,
back of our reason, our understanding, and our

«6o The Strenuous Life

common sense, there must lie, in fuU strength, the
tremendous ftmdamental passions, which are not
often needed, but which every truly great race
must have as a well-spring of motive in time of
need.

I shall end by quoting to you in substance cer-
tain words from a minister of the gospel, a most
witty man, who was also a philosopher and a man
of profoimd wisdom, Sydney Smith :

**The history of the world shows us that men
are not to be counted by their ntunbers, but by
the fire and vigor of their passions ; by their deep
^ sense of injury; by their memory of past glory; by
their eagerness for fresh fame; by their clear and
steady resolution of either ceasing to live, or of
achieving a particular object, which, when it is
once formed, strikes off a load of manacles and
chains, and gives free space to all heavenly and
heroic feelings. All great and extraordinary
actions come from the heart. There are seasons
in human affairs when qualities, fit enough to con-
duct the common business of life, are feeble and
useless, when men must trust to emotion for that
safety which reason at such times can never give.
These are the feelings which led the ten thousand
over the Carduchian Mountains; these are the
feelings by which a handful of Greeks broke in
pieces the power of Persia ; and in the fens of the
Dutch and in the mountains of the Swiss these

The Heroic Virtues

36x

feelings defended happiness and revenged the
oppressions of man! God calls all the passions
out in their keenness and vigor for the present
safety of mankind, anger and revenge and the
heroic mind, and a readiness to suffer — all the
secret strength, all the invisible array of the feel-
ings — all that nature has reserved for the great
scenes of the world. When the usual hopes and
the common aids of man are all gone, nothing
remains under God but those passions which have
often proved the best ministers of His purpose and
the surest protectors of the world."

NATIONAL DUTIES

Address at Minnbsota Statb Fair, Sbptbmbbr a, 1901

»6i

CHAPTER XVII.

NATIONAL DUTIES.

IN his admirable series of studies of twentieth-
century problems, Dr. Lyman Abbott has
pointed out that we are a nation of pioneers ;
that the first colonists to our shores were pioneers,
and that pioneers selected out from among the
descendants of these eariy pioneers, mingled with
others selected afresh from the Old World, pushed
westward into the wilderness and laid the founda-
tions for new commonwealths. They were men
of hope and expectation, of enterprise and energy;
for the men of dull content or more dull despair
had no part in the great movement into and across
the New World. Our country has been populated
by pioneers, and therefore it has in it more energy,
more enterprise, more expansive power than any
other in the wide world.

You whom I am now addressing stand for the
most part but one generation removed from these
pioneers. You are typical Americans, for you
have done the great, the characteristic, the typical
work of our American life. In making homes and
carving out careers for yourselves and yotu: chil-
dren, you have built up this State. Throughout
our history the success of the home-maker has

266 The Strenuous Life

been but another name for the upbuilding of the
nation. The men who with ax in the forests and
pick in the mountains and plow on the prairies
pushed to completion the dominion of our people
over the American wilderness have given the defi-
nite shape to our nation. They have shown the
qualities of daring, endurance, and far-sighted-
ness, of eager desire for victory and stubborn
refusal to accept defeat, which go to make up the
/ ^eQtial--xn.anliness_ of the American character.
Above all, they have recognized in practical form
the ftmdamental law of success in American life —
the law of worthy work, the law of high, resolute
endeavor. We have but little room among our
people for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle ;
and it is no less true that there is scant room in the
world at large for the nation with mighty thews
that dares not to be great.

Surely in speaking to the sons of the men who
actually did the rough and hard and infinitely
glorious work of making the great Northwest what
it now is, I need hardly insist upon the righteous-
ness of this doctrine. In your own vigorous lives
you show by every act how scant is your patience
with those who do not see in the life of effort the
life supremely worth living. Sometimes we hear
those who do not work spoken of with envy.
Surely the wilfully idle need arouse in the breast
of a healthy man no emotion stronger than that

National Duties 267

of contempt — at the outside no emotion stronger
than angry contempt. The feeling of envy would
have in it an admission of inferiority on our part,
to which the men who know not the sterner joys
of life are not entitled. Poverty is a bitter thing;
but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless
vactiity and physical, moral, and intellectual flab-
biness, to which those doom themselves who
elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all
vain pxxrstdts — ^the pursuit of mere pleasure as a
sufficient end in itself. The wilfully idle man, like
the wilfully barren woman, has no place in a sane,
healthy, and vigorous community. Moreover, the
gross and hideous selfishness for which each stands
defeats even its own miserable aims. Exactly as
infinitely the happiest woman is she who has borne
and brought up many healthy children, so infi-
nitely the happiest man is he who has toiled hard
and successfully in his life-work. The work may
be done in a thousand different ways — ^with the
brain or the hands, in the study, the field, or the
workshop — ^if it is honest work, honestly done and
well worth doing, that is all we have a right to ask.
Every father and mother here, if they are wise, will
bring up their children not to shirk difficulties, but
to meet them and overcome them ; not to strive
after a life of ignoble ease, but to strive to do their
duty, first to themselves and their families, and
then to the whole State; and this duty must

268 The Strenuous Life

inevitably take the shape of work in some form or
other. You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are
true to your ancestry, must make your lives as
worthy as they made theirs. They sought for
true success, and therefore they did not seek ease.
They knew that success comes only to those who
lead the life of endeavor.

It seems to me that the simple acceptance of
this fimdamental fact of American life, this
acknowledgment that the law of work is the
fundamental law of our being, will help us to start
aright in facing not a few of the problems that
confront us from without and from within. As
regards internal affairs, it should teach us the
prime need of remembering that, after all has been
said and done, the chief factor in any man's suc-
cess or failure must be his own character — that is,
the sum of his common sense, his courage, his virile
energy and capacity. Nothing can take the place
of this individual factor.

I do not for a moment mean that much cannot
be done to supplement it. Besides each one of
us working individually, all of us have got to work
together. We cannot possibly do our best work
as a nation unless all of us know how to act in com-
bination as well as how to act each individually for
himself. The acting in combination can take
many forms, but of course its most effective form
must be when it comes in the shape of law — ^that

National Duties 169

is, of action by the commtinity as a whole through
the law-making body.

But it is not possible ever to insure prosperity
merely by law. Something for good can be done
by law, and a bad law can do an infinity of mis-
chief ; but, after all, the best law can only prevent
wrong and injustice, and give to the thrifty, the
far-seeing, and the hard-working a chance to exer-
cise to best advantage their special and peculiar
abilities. No hard-and-fast rule can be laid down
as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering
between man and man, between interest and in-
terest. All that can be said is that it is highly
tmdesirable, on the one hand, to weaken individual
initiative, and, on the other hand, that in a con-
stantly increasing ntunber of cases we shall find it
necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in
the past we have shackled force. It is not only
highly desirable but necessary that there should
be legislation which shall carefully shield the in-
terests of wage-workers, and which shall discrimi-
nate in favor of the honest and htimane employer
by removing the disadvantage under which he
stands when compared with unscrupulous com-
petitors who have no conscience and will do right
only tmder fear of punishment.

Nor can legislation stop only with what are
termed labor questions. The vast individual and
corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of

aro The Strenuous Life

capital, which have marked the development of our
industrial system create new conditions, and neces-
sitate a change from the old attitude of the State
and the nation toward property. It is probably
true that the large majority of the forttmes that
now exist in this country have been amassed not
by injuring our people, but as an incident to the
conferring of great benefits upon the conMntmity;
and this, no matter what may have been the con-
scious purpose of those amassing them. There is
but the scantiest justification for most of the out-
cry against the men of wealth as such; and it ought
to be unnecessary to state that any appeal which
directly or indirectly leads to suspicion and hatred
among ourselves, which tends to limit opporttmity,
and therefore to shut the door of success against
poor men of talent, and, finally, which entails the
possibility of lawlessness and violence, is an attack
upon the fundamental properties of American citi-
zenship. Our interests are at bottom conunon;
in the long nm we go up or go down together. Yet
more and more it is evident that the State, and if
necessary the nation, has got to possess the right
of supervision and control as regards the great cor-
porations which are its creatiu^es ; particularly as
regards the great business combinations which
derive a portion of their importance from the
existence of some monopolistic tendency. The
right should be exercised with caution and self-

National Duties 271

restraint; but it should exist, so that it may be
invoked if the need arises.

So much for our duties, each to himself and each
to his neighbor, within the limits of our own coun-
try. But our country, as it strides forward with
ever-increasing rapidity to a foremost place among
the world powers, must necessarily find, more and
more, that it has world duties also. There are
excellent people who believe that we can shirk
these duties and yet retain our self-respect ; but
these good people are in error. Other good people
seek to deter us from treading the path of hard but
lofty duty by bidding us remember that all nations
that have achieved greatness, that have expanded
and played their part as world powers, have in the
end passed away. So they have ; and so have all
others. The weak and the stationary have van-
ished as surely as, and more rapidly than, those
whose citizens felt within them the lift that impels
generous souls to great and noble effort. This is
only another way of stating the tmiversal law of
death, which is itself part of the tmiversal law of
life. The man who works, the man who does great
deeds, in the end dies as surely as the veriest idler
who cumbers the earth's surface; but he leaves
behind him the great fact that he has done his
work well. So it is with nations. While the
nation that has dared to be great, that has had
the will and the power to change the destiny of

a7« The Strenuous Life

the ages, in the end must die, yet no less surely the
nation that has played the part of the weakling
must also die; and whereas the nation that has
done nothing leaves nothing behind it, the nation
that has done a great work really continues, though
in changed form, to live forevermore. The Roman
has passed away exactly as all the nations of
antiquity which did not expand when he expanded
have passed away; but their very memory has
vanished, while he himself is still a living force
throughout the wide world in our entire civiliza-
tion of to-day, and will so continue through cotmt-
less generations, through untold ages.

It is because we believe with all our heart and
soul in the greatness of this country, because we
feel the thrill of hardy life in our veins, and are
confident that to us is given the privilege of play-
ing a leading part in the century that has just
opened, that we hail with eager ddight the oppor-
tunity to do whatever task Providence may allot
us. We admit with all sincerity that our first
duty is within our own household ; that we must
not merely talk, but act, in favor of cleanliness and
decency and righteousness, in all political, social,
and civic matters. No prosperity and no glory
can save a nation that is rotten at heart. We must
ever keep the core of our national being sound, and
see to it that not only our citizens in private life,
but, above all, oiu- statesmen in public life, prac-

National Duties 273

tise the old commonplace virtues which from time
immemorial have lain at the root of all true
national well-being. Yet while this is our first
duty, it is not our whole duty. Exactly as each
man, while doing first his duty to his wife and the
children within his home, must yet, if he hopes to
amount to much, strive mightily in the worid out-
side his home, so our nation, while first of all seeing
to its own domestic well-being, must not shrink
from playing its part among the great nations
without. Our duty may take many forms in the
future as it has taken many forms in the past.
Nor is it possible to lay down a hard-and-fast rule
for all cases. We must ever face the fact of our
shifting national needs, of the always-changing
opportunities that present themselves. But we
may be certain of one thing: whether we wish it
or not, we cannot avoid hereafter having duties to
do in the face of other nations. All that we can
do is to settle whether we shall perform these
duties well or ill.

Right here let me make as vigorous a plea as I
know how in favor of saying nothing that we do
not mean, and of acting without hesitation up to
whatever we say. A good many of you are prob-
ably acquainted with the old proverb: "Speak
softly and carry a big stick — ^you will go far." If
a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a
big stick will not save him from trouble; and
z8

274 The Strenuous Life

neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the
softness there does not lie strength, power. In
private life there are few beings more obnoxious
than the man who is always loudly boasting ; and
if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words
his position becomes absolutely contemptible. So
it is with the nation. It is both foolish and
undignified to indulge in undue self-glorifica-
tion, and, above all, in loose-tongued denuncia-
tion of other peoples. Whenever on any point
we come in contact with a foreign power, I
hope that we shall always strive to speak cour-
teoiisly and respectfully of that foreign power.
Let us make it evident that we intend to do justice.
Then let us make it equally evident that we will
not tolerate injustice being done to us in return.
Let us further make it evident that we use no
words which we are not prepared to back up with
deeds, and that while our speech is always mod-
erate, we are ready and willing to make it good.
Such an attitude will be the surest possible guar-
anty of that self-respecting peace, the attainment
of which is and must ever be the prime aim of a
self-governing people.

This is the attitude we should take as regards
the Monroe Doctrine. There is not the least need
of blustering about it. Still less should it be used
as a pretext for our own aggrandizement at the
expense of any other American state. But, most

National Duties 275

emphatically, we miist make it evident that we
intend on this point ever to maintain the old
American position. Indeed, it is hard to under-
stand how any man can take any other position,
now that we are all looking forward to the build-
ing of the Isthmian Canal. The Monroe Doctrine
is not international law; but there is no necessity
that it should be. All that is needful is that it
should continue to be a cardinal feature of Amer-
ican policy on this continent; and the Spanish-
American states should, in their own interest,
champion it as strongly as we do. We do not by
this doctrine intend to sanction any policy of
aggression by one American con^nonwealth at
the expense of any other, nor any policy of com-
mercial discrimination against any foreign power
whatsoever. Commercially, as far as this doctrine
is concerned, all we wish is a fair field and no favor ;
but if we are wise we shall strenuously insist that
under no pretext whatsoever shall there be any
territorial aggrandizement on American soil by
any Eiu"opean power, and this, no matter what
form the territorial aggrandizement may take.

We most earnestly hope and believe that the
chance of our having any hostile miUtary complica-
tion with any foreign power is very small. But
that there will come a strain, a jar, here and there,
from coHMnercial and agricultiu'al — ^that is, from
industrial — competition, is almost inevitable.

276 The Strenuous Life

Here again we have got to remember that our first
duty is to our own people, and yet that we can best
get justice by doing justice. We must continue
the policy that has been so brilliantly successful
in the past, and so shape our economic system as
to give every advantage to the skill, energy, and
intelligence of our farmers, merchants, manufac-
turers, and wage-workers ; and yet we must also
remember, in dealing with other nations, that
benefits must be given where benefits are sought.
It is not possible to dogmatize as to the exact way
of attaining this end, for the exact conditions can-
not be foretold. In the long run, one of our prime
needs is stability and continuity of economic
policy ; and yet, through treaty or by direct legis-
lation, it may, at least in certain cases, become
advantageous to supplement our present policy
by a system of reciprocal benefit and obliga-
tion.

Throughout a large part of our national career
our history has been one of expansion, the expan-
sion being of different kinds at different times.
This expansion is not a matter of regret, but of
pride. It is vain to tell a people as masterful as
ours that the spirit of enterprise is not safe. The
true American has never feared to run risks when
the prize to be won was of sufficient value. No
nation capable of self-government, and of develop-
ing by its own efforts a sane and orderly civiliza-

National Duties 277

tion, no matter how small it may be, has anjrthing
to fear from us. Our dealings with Cuba illustrate
this, and should be forever a subject of just
national pride. We speak in no spirit of arrogance
when we state as a simple historic fact that never
in recent times has any great nation acted with
such disinterestedness as we have shown in Cuba.
We freed the island from the Spanish yoke. We
then earnestly did our best to help the Cubans in
the establishment of free education, of law and
order, of material prosperity, of the cleanliness
necessary to sanitary well-being in their great
cities. We did all this at great expense of treasure,
at some expense of life ; and now we are establish-
ing them in a free and independent common-
wealth, and have asked in return nothing whatever
save that at no time shall their independence be
prostituted to the advantage of some foreign rival
of ours, or so as to menace our well-being. To
have failed to ask this would have amotmted to
national stultification on our part.

In the PhiUppines we have brought peace, and
we are at this moment giving them such freedom
and self-government as they could never under
any conceivable conditions have obtained had we
turned them loose to sink into a welter of blood
and confusion, or to become the prey of some
strong tyraimy without or within. The bare recital
of the facts is sufficient to show that we did our

278 The Strenuous Life

duty; and what prouder title to honor can a
nation have than to have done its duty ? We have
done our duty to ourselves, and we have done the
higher duty of promoting the civilization of man-
kind. The first essential of civiUzation is law.
Anarchy is simply the handmaiden and fore-
runner of tyranny and despotism. Law and order
enforced with justice and by strength lie at the
foundations of civilization. Law must be based
upon justice, else it cannot stand, and it must be
enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness
in enforcing it means in the end that there is no
justice and no law, nothing but the rule of dis-
orderly and unscrupulous strength. Without the
habit of orderly obedience to the law, without the
stem enforcement of the laws at the expense of
those who defiantly resist them, there can be no
possible progress, moral or material, in civiliza-
tion. There can be no weakening of the law-
abiding spirit here at home, if we are permanently
to succeed ; and just as little can we afford to show
weakness abroad. Lawlessness and anarchy were
put down in the Philippines as a prerequisite to
introducing the reign of justice.

Barbarism has, and can have, no place in a
civilized world. It is our duty toward the people
living in barbarism to see that they are freed from
their chains, and we can free them only by destroy-
ing barbarism itself. The missionary, the mer^

National Duties 279

chant and the soldier may each have to play a part
in this destruction, and in the consequent uplifting
of the people. Exactly as it is the duty of a civil-
ized power scrupulously to respect the rights of all
weaker civilized powers and gladly to help those
who are struggling toward civilization, so it is its
duty to put down savagery and barbarism. As in
such a work human instruments must be used, and
as htunan instruments are imperfect, this means
that at times there will be injustice ; that at times
merchant or soldier, or even missionary, may do
wrong. Let us instantly condemn and rectify
such wrong when it occurs, and if possible punish
the wrong-doer. But shame, thrice shame to us,
if we are so foolish as to make such occasional
wrong-doing an excuse for failing to perform a
a great and righteous task. Not only in our own
land, but throughout the world, throughout all
history, the advance of civilization has been of
incalculable benefit to mankind, and those through
whom it has advanced deserve the highest honor.
All honor to the missionary, all honor to the sol-
dier, all honor to the merchant who now in our
own day have done so much to bring light into
the world's dark places.

Let me insist again, for fear of possible miscon-
struction, upon the fact that our duty is twofold,
and that we must raise others while we are benefit-
ing ourselves. In bringing order to the Philippines,

28o The Strenuous Life

otir soldiers added a new page to the honor-
roll of American history, and they incalctilably
benefited the islanders themselves. Under the
wise administration of Governor Taft the islands
now enjoy a peace and liberty of which they have
hitherto never even dreamed. But this peace and
liberty imder the law must be supplemented by
material, by industrial development. Every en-
couragement should be given to their commercial
development, to the introduction of American
industries and products ; not merely because this
will be a good thing for oiu- people, but infinitely
more because it will be of incalculable benefit to
the people in the Philippines.

We shall make mistakes; and if we let these
mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show
ourselves weaklings. Half a century ago Minne-
sota and the two Dakotas were Indian himting-
grounds. We committed plenty of bltmders, and
now and then worse than bltmders, in our dealings
with the Indians. But who does not admit at the
present day that we were right in wresting from
barbarism and adding to civilization the territory
out of which we have made these beautiful States?
And now we are civilizing the Indian and putting
him on a level to which he could never have
attained imder the old conditions.

In the Philippines let us remember that the
spirit and not the mere form of government is the

National Duties 281

essential matter. The Tagalogs have a htindred-
fold the freedom under us that they would have
if we had abandoned the islands. We are not
trying to subjugate a people; we are trying to
develop them and make them a law-abiding, in-
dustrious, and educated people, and we hope
ultimately a self-governing people. In short, in
the work we have done we are but carrying out
the true principles of our democracy. We work
in a spirit of self-respect for ourselves and of good
will toward others, in a spirit of love for and of
infinite faith in mankind. We do not blindly
refuse to face the evils that exist, or the short-
comings inherent in htimanity; but across bltm-
dering and shirking, across selfishness and mean-
ness of motive, across short-sightedness and cow-
ardice, we gaze steadfastly toward the far horizon
of golden triximph.

If you will study our past history as a nation
you will see we have made many bltmders and
have been guilty of many shortcomings, and yet
that we have always in the end come out victo-
rious because we have refused to be daunted by
blunders and defeats, have recognized them, but
have persevered in spite of them. So it must be
in the future. We gird up our loins as a nation,
with the stem purpose to play our part manfully
in winning the ultimate triumph; and therefore
we turn scornfully aside from the paths of mere

382 The Strenuous Life

ease and idleness, and with tinfaltering steps
tread the rough road of endeavor, smiting down
the wrong and battling for the right, as Great-
heart smote and battled in Bunyan's immortal
story.

THE LABOR QUESTION

At thb Chicago Labor Day Picnic. Sbptbmbbr 3, 1900

J$3

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE LABOR QUESTION.

BY far the greatest problem, the most far-
reaching in its stupendous importance, is
that problem, or rather that group of prob-
lems, which we have grown to speak of as the labor
question. It must be always a peculiar privilege
for any thoughtful public man to address a body
of men predominantly composed of wage-workers,
for the foundation of our whole social structure
rests upon the material and moral well-being, the
intelligence, the foresight, the sanity, the sense of
duty, and the wholesome patriotism of the wage-
worker. This is doubly the case now; for, in
addition to each man's individual action, you
have learned the great lesson of acting in com-
bination. It would be impossible to overestimate
the far-reaching influences of, and, on the whole,
the amount of good done through yotu* associa-
tions.

In addressing you, the one thing that I wish
to avoid is any mere glittering generality, any
mere high-sounding phraseology, and, above all,
any appeal whatsoever made in a demagogic spirit,
or in a spirit of mere emotionalism. When we
come to dealing with our social and industrial

a85

386 The Strenuous Life

needs, remedies, rights and wrongs, a ton of ora-
tory is not worth an ounce of hard-headed, kindly
common sense.

The fundamental law of healthy political life in
this great repubUc is that each man shall in deed,
and not merely in word, be treated strictly on his
worth as a man ; that each shall do ftill justice to
his fellow, and in return shall exact ftdl justice
from him. Each group of men has its special in-
terests ; and yet the higher, the broader and deeper
interests are those which apply to all men alike ; for
the spirit of brotherhood in American citizenship,
when rightly understood and rightly applied, is
more important than aught else. Let us scrupu-
lously guard the specif interests of the wage-
worker, the farmer, the manufacturer, and the mer-
chant, giving to each man his due and also seeing
that he does not wrong his fellows ; but let us keep
ever clearly before our minds the great fact that,
where the deepest chords are touched, the interests
of all are alike and must be guarded alike.

We must beware of any attempt to make hatred
in any form the basis of action. Most emphatic-
ally each of us needs to stand up for his own rights ;
all men and all groups of men are bound to retain
their self-respect, and, demanding this same re-
spect from others, to see that they are not injured
and that they have secured to them the fullest lib-
erty of thought and action. But to feed fat a

The Labor Question asj

grudge against others, while it may or may not
harm them, is sure in the long run to do infinitely
greater harm to the man himself.

The more a healthy American sees of his fellow-
Americans the greater grows his conviction that
our chief troubles come from mutual misunder-
standing, from failure to appreciate one another's
point of view. In other words, the great need is
fellow-feeling, sjmipathy, brotherhood; and all
this naturally comes by association. It is, there-
fore, of vital importance that there should be such
association. The most serious disadvantage in
city life is the tendency of each man to keep
isolated in his own little set, and to look upon the
vast majority of his fellow-citizens indifferently,
80 that he soon comes to forget that they have the
same red blood, the same loves and hates, the same
likes and dislikes, the same desire for good, and
the same perpetual tendency, ever needing to be
checked and corrected, to lapse from good into evil.
If only our people can be thrown together, where
they act on a common ground with the same
motives, and have the same objects, we need not
have much fear of their failing to acquire a genuine
respect for one another; and with such respect
there must finally come fair play for all.

The first time I ever labored alongside of and
got thrown into intimate companionship with men
who were mighty men of their hands was in the

288 The Strenuous Life

cattle country of the Northwest. I soon grew to
have an immense liking and respect for my asso-
ciates, and as I knew them, and did not know
similar workers in other parts of the cotmtry, it
seemed to me that the ranch-owner was a great
deal better than any Eastern business man, and
that the cow-puncher stood on a corresponding
altitude compared with any of his brethren in the
East.

Well, after a little while I got thrown into close
relations with the farmers, and it did not take long
before I had moved them up alongside of my
beloved cowmen ; and I made up my mind that
they really formed the backbone of the land. Then,
because of certain circumstances, I was thrown
into intimate contact with railroad men; and I
gradually came to the conclusion that these rail-
road men were about the finest citizens there were
anywhere around. Then, in the course of some
official work, I was thrown into close contact with
a number of the carpenters, blacksmiths, and men
in the building trades, that is, skilled mechanics of
a high order, and it was not long before I had
them on the same pedestal with the others. By
that time it began to dawn on me that the diflEer-
ence was not in the men but in my own point of
view, and that if any man is thrown into close con-
tact with any large body of our fellow-citizens it
is apt to be the man's own fault if he does not

The Labor Question 289

grow to fed for them a very hearty regard and,
moreover, grow to understand that, on the great
questions that lie at the root of hiunan well-being,
he and they feel alike.

Our prime need as a nation is that every Amer-
ican should understand and work with his fellow-
citizens, getting into touch with them, so that by
acttial contact he may learn that fundamentally
he and they have the same interests, needs, and
aspirations.

Of course different sections of the commtmity
have different needs. The gravest questions that
are before us, the questions that are for all time,
affect us all alike. But there are separate needs
that aflfect separate groups of men, just as there
are separate needs that affect each individual man.
It is just as tmwise to forget the one fact as it is to
forget the other. The specialization of our mod-
em industrial life, its high development and
complex character, means a corresponding special-
ization in needs and interests. While we should,
so long as we can safely do so, give to each indi-
vidual the largest possible liberty, a liberty which
necessarily includes initiative and responsibility,
yet we must not hesitate to interfere whenever it
is clearly seen that harm comes from excessive
individualism. We cannot afford to be empirical
one way or the other. In the cotmtry districts
the surroundings are such that a man can ustially
19

290 The Strenuous Life

work out his own fate by himself to the best advan-
tage. In our cities, or where men congr^[ate in
masses, it is often necessary to work in combina-
tion, that is, through associations ; and here it is
that we can see the great good conferred by labor
organizations, by trade tmions. Of course, if
managed tmwisely, the very power of such a union
or organization makes it capable of doing much
harm ; but, on the whole, it would be hard to over-
estimate the good these organizations have done
in the past, and still harder to estimate the good
they can do in the futiu^ if handled with resolu-
tion, forethought, honesty, and sanity.

It is not possible to lay down a hard-and-fast
rule, logically perfect, as to when the State shall
interfere, and when the individual must be left
tmhampered and tmhelped.

We have exactly the same right to regulate the
conditions of life and work in factories and tene-
ment-houses that we have to regulate fire-escapes
and the like in other houses. In certain commu-
nities the existence of a thoroughly efficient depart-
ment of factory inspection is just as essential as
the establishment of a fire department. How far
we shall go in regulating the hours of labor, or the
Uabilities of employers, is a matter of expediency,
and each case must be determined on its own
merits, exactly as it is a matter of expediency to
determine what so-called ** public utilities** the

The Labor Question 291

community shall itself own and what ones it shall
leave to private or corporate ownership, securing
to itself merely the right to regulate. Sometimes
one course is expedient, sometimes the other.

In my own State during the last half-dozen
years we have made a number of notable strides
in labor legislation, and, with very few exceptions,
the laws have worked well. This is, of course,
partly because we have not tried to do too much
and have proceeded cautiously, feeling our way,
and, while always advancing, yet taking each step
in advance only when we were satisfied that the
step already taken was in the right direction. To
invite reaction by tmregulated zeal is never wise,
and is sometimes fatal.

In New York our action has been along two
lines. In the first place, we determined that as
an employer of labor the State should set a good
example to other employers. We do not intend to
permit the people's money to be squandered or to
tolerate any work that is not the best. But we
think that, while rigidly insisting upon good work,
we should see that there is fair play in retiun.
Accordingly, we have adopted an eight-hour law
for the State employees and for all contractors who
do State work, and we have also adopted a law
requiring that the fair market rate of wages shall
be given. I am glad to say that both measures
have so far, on the whole, worked well. Of course

292 The Strenuous Life

there have been individtial diffictilties, mostly
where the work is intermittent, as, for instance,
among lock-tenders on the canals, where it is very
difficult to define what eight hotirs* work means.
But, on the whole, the result has been good. The
practical experiment of working men for eight
hours has been advantageous to the State. Poor
work is always dear, whether poorly paid or not,
and good work is always well worth having; and
as a mere question of expediency, aside even from
the question of hiunanity, we find that we can
obtain the best work by paying fair wages and
pennitting the work to go on only for a reasonable
time.

The other side of our labor legislation has been
that affecting the wage-workers who do not work
for the State. Here we have acted in three dif-
ferent ways : through the Btu'eau of Labor Statis-
tics, through the Board of Mediation and Arbitra-
tion, and through the Department of Factory
Inspection.

During the last two years the Board of Mediation
and Arbitration have been especially successful.
Not only have they succeeded in settling many
strikes after they were started, but they have suc-
ceeded in preventing a much larger number of
strikes before they got fairly tmder way. Where
possible it is always better to mediate before the
strike begins than to try to arbitrate when the fight

The Labor Question 293

is on and both sides have grown stubborn and
bitter.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has done more
than merely gather the statistics, for by keeping
in close touch with all the leading labor interests
it has kept them informed on cotmtless matters
that were really of vital concern to them. Inci-
dentally, one pleasing feature of the work of this
btu'eau has been the steady upward tendency
shown during the last fotu* years both in amount
of wages received and in the quantity and steadi-
ness of employment. No other man has benefited
so much as the wage-worker by the growth in pros-
perity during these years.

The Factory Inspection Department deals
chiefly, of course, with conditions in great cities.
One very important phase of its work during the
last two years has been the enforcement of the
anti-sweatshop law, which is primarily designed
to do away with the tenement-house factory. The
conditions of Ufe in some of the congested tene-
ment-house districts, notably in New York City,
had become such as to demand action by the State.
As with other reforms, in order to make it stable
and permanent, it had to be gradual. It proceeded
by evolution, not revolution. But progress has
been steady, and wherever needed it has been radi-
cal. Much remains to be done, but the condition
of the dwellers in the congested districts has been

294 The Strenuous Life

markedly improved, to the great benefit not only
of themselves, but of the whole community.

A word on the general question. In the first
place, in addressing an audience like this, I do not
have to say that the law of life is work, and that
work in itself, so far from being a hardship, is a
great blessing, provided, always, it is carried on
tmder conditions which preserve a man's self-
respect and which allow him to develop his own
character and rear his children so that he and they,
as well as the whole commimity of which he and
they are part, may steadily move onward and
upward. The idler, rich or poor, is at best a use-
less and is generally a noxious member of the com-
munity. To whom much has been given, from
him much is rightftilly expected, and a heavy
burden of responsibility rests upon the man of
means to justify by his actions the social con-
ditions which have rendered it possible for him
or his forefathers to accumulate and to keep the
property he enjojrs. He is not to be excused if
he does not render full measure of service to the
State and to the commtmity at large. There are
many ways in which this service can be ren-
dered, — in art, in literattire, in philanthropy, as
a statesman, as a soldier, — but in some way he is
in honor boimd to render it, so that benefit may
accrue to his brethren who have been less favored
by fortime than he has been. In short, he must

The Labor Question 295

work, and work not only for himself, but for
others. If he does not work, he fails not only in
his duty to the rest of the community, but he fails
signally in his duty to himself. There is no need
of envying the idle. Ordinarily, we can aflford to
treat them with impatient contempt; for when
they fail to do their duty they fail to get from life
the highest and keenest pleasure that life can give.
To do our duty — ^that is the summing up of the
whole matter. We must do our duty by our-
selves and we must do our duty by our neighbors.
Every good citizen, whatever his condition, owes
his first service to those who are nearest to him,
who are dependent upon him, to his wife and his
children ; next he owes his duty to his fellow-citi-
zens, and this duty he must perform both to his
individual neighbor and to the State, which is
simply a form of expression for all his neighbors
combined. He must keep his self-respect and
exact the respect of others. It is eminently wise
and proper to strive for such leistire in our lives as
will give a chance for self -improvement ; but woe
to the man who seeks, or trains up his children to
seek, idleness instead of the chance to do good
work. No worse wrong can be done by a man to
his children than to teach them to go through life
endeavoring to shirk diffictilties instead of meeting
them and overcoming them. You men here in the
West have built up this coimtry not by seeking to

296 The Strenuous Life

avoid work, but by doing it well ; not by flinching
from every difBctilty, but by triumphing over each
as it arose and making out of it a stepping-stone
to ftuther triumph.

We must all leam the two lessons — ^the lesson
of self-help and the lesson of giving help to and
receiving help from our brother. There is not a
man of us who does not sometimes slip, who does
not sometimes need a helping hand ; and woe to
him who, when the chance comes, fails to stretch
out that helping hand. Yet, though each man
can and ought thus to be helped at times, he is lost
beyond redemption if he becomes so dependent
upon outside help that he feels that his own exer-
tions are secondary. Any man at times will
sttunble, and it is then our duty to lift him up and
set him on his feet again ; but no man can be per-
manently carried, for if he expects to be carried
he shows that he is not worth canying.

Before us loom industrial problems vast in their
importance and their complexity. The last half-
centiuy has been one of extraordinary social and
industrial development. The changes have been
far-reaching; some of them for good, and some of
them for evil. It is not given to the wisest of us
to see into the future with absolute clearness. No
man can be certain that he has fotmd the entire
solution of this infinitely great and intricate prob-
lem, and yet each man of us, if he would do his

The Labor Question J97

duty, must strive manfully so far as in him lies to
help bring about that solution. It is not as yet
possible to say what shall be the exact limit of
influence allowed the State, or what limit shall be
set to that right of individual initiative so dear to
the hearts of the American people. All we can
say is that the need has been shown on the one
hand for action by the people, in their collective
capacity through the State, in many matters;
that in other matters much can be done by asso-
ciations of different groups of individuals, as in
trade tmions and similar organizations ; and that
in other matters it remains now as true as ever
that final success will be for the man who trusts
in the struggle only to his cool head, his brave
heart, and his strong right arm. There are
spheres in which the State can properly act, and
spheres in which a free field must be given to indi-
vidual initiative.

Though the conditions of life have grown so
puzzling in their complexity, though the changes
have been so vast, yet we may remain absolutely
stire of one thing, that now, as ever in the past, and
as it ever will be in the future, there can be no sub-
stitute for the elemental virtues, for the elemental
qualities to which we allude when we speak of a
man as not only a good man but as emphatically
a man. We can build up the standard of indi-
vidual citizenship and individual well-being, we

^98 The Strenuous Life

can raise the national standard and make it what
it can and shall be made, only by each of us stead-
fastly keeping in mind that there can be no substi-
tute for the world-old, htundrum, commonplace
qualities of truth, justice and courage, thrift, in-
dustry, common sense, and genuine sympathy with
and fellow-feeling for others. The nation is the
aggregate of the individuals composing it, and
each individual American ever raises the nation
higher when he so conducts himself as to wrong no
man, to suffer no wrong from others, and to show
both his sturdy capacity for self-help and his
readiness to extend a helping hand to the neighbor
sinking under a burden too heavy for him to bear.
The one fact which all of us need to keep stead-
fastly before our eyes is the need that performance
should square with promise if good work is to be
done, whether in the industrial or in the political
world. Nothing does more to promote mental
dishonesty and moral insincerity than the habit
either of promising the impossible, or of demand-
ing the performance of the impossible, or, finally,
of failing to keep a promise that has been made ;
and it makes not the slightest difference whether
it is a promise made on the sttunp or off the stiunp.
Remember that there are two sides to the wrong
thus committed. There is, first, the wrong of fail-
ing to keep a promise made, and, in the next place,
there is the wrong of demanding the impossible*

The Labor Question 299

and therefore forcing or permitting weak or un-
scrupulous men to make a promise which they
either know, or should know, cannot be kept. No
small part of our troubles in dealing with many
of the gravest social questions, such as the so-
called labor question, the trust question, and
others like them, arises from these two attitudes.
We can do a great deal when we undertake,
soberly, to do the possible. When we undertake
the impossible, we too often fail to do anything at
all. The success of the law for the taxation of
franchises recently enacted in New York State, a
measure which has resulted in putting upon the
assessment books nearly $200,000,000 worth of
property which had theretofore escaped taxation,
is an illustration of how much can be accomplished
when effort is made along sane and sober lines,
with care not to promise the impossible but to
make performance square with promise, and with
insistence on the fact that honesty is never one-
sided, and that in dealing with corporations it is
necessary both to do to them and to exact from
them full and complete justice. The success of
this effort, made in a resolute but also a temperate
and reasonable spirit, shows what can be done
when such a problem is approached in a sound
and healthy manner. It offers a striking con-
trast to the complete breakdown of the species of
crude and violent anti-trust legislation which has

300 The Strenuous Life

been so often attempted, and which has always
failed, becaiise of its very cnideness and violence,
to make any impression upon the real and danger-
ous evils which have excited such just popular
resentment.

I thank you for listening to me. I have come
here to-day not to preach to you, but partly to
tell you how these matters look and seem to me,
and partly to set forth certain facts which seem to
me to show the essential commtmity that there is
among all of tis who strive in good faith to do our
duty as American citizens. No man can do his
duty who does not work, and the work may take
many different shapes, mental and physical; but
of tWs you can rest assured, that this work can be
done well for the nation only when each of xas
approaches his separate task, not only with the
determination to do it, but with the knowledge
that his fellow, when he in his turn does his task,
has fundamentally the same rights and the same
duties, and that while each must work for him-
self, yet each must also work for the common
welfare of all.

On the whole, we shall all go up or go down
together. Some may go up or go down further
than others, but, disregarding special exceptions,
the rule is that we must all share in common some-
thing of whatever adversity or whatever prosperity
is in store for the nation as a whole. In the long

The Labor Question 301

run each section of the community will rise or fall
as the commimity rises or falls. If hard times
come to the nation, whether as the result of natu-
ral causes or because they are invited by our own
folly, all of us will suffer. Certain of us will suffer
more, and others less, but all will suffer somewhat.
If, on the other hand, under Providence, our own
energy and good sense bring prosperity to us, all
will share in that prosperity. We will not all
share alike, but something each one of us will get.
Let tis strive to make the conditions of life such
that as nearly as possible each man shall receive
the share to which he is honestly entitled and no
more ; and let us remember at the same time that
our efforts must be to build up, rather than to
strike down, and that we can best help ourselves,
not at the expense of others, but by heartily work-
ing with them for the common good of each and all.

CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP

Addrbss bbforb thb Young Mbn's Christian Associa-
tion, Carnboib Hall, Nbw Yorjc, Dbcbicbbr 30, 1900

CHAPTER XIX.

CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP.

IT is a peculiar pleasure to me to come before
you to-night to greet you and to bear testi-
mony to the great good that has been done by
these Yoimg Men's and Yoimg Women's Christian
Associations throughout the United States. More
and more we are getting to recognize the law of
combination. This is true of many phases in our
industrial life, and it is equally true of the world
of philanthropic effort. Nowhere is it, or will it
ever be, possible to supplant individual effort, indi-
vidual initiative; but in addition to this there
must be work in combination. More and more
this is recognized as true not only in charitable
work proper, but in that best form of philanthropic
endeavor where we all do good to ourselves by all
joining together to do good to one another. This
is exactly what is done in your associations.

It seems to me that there are several reasons
why you are entitled to especial recognition from
all who are interested in the betterment of our
American social system. First and foremost,
your organization recognizes the vital need of
brotherhood, the most vital of all our needs here
in this great republic. The existence of a Young
90 3P5

3o6 The Strenuous Life

Men's or Young Women's Christian Association
is certain proof that some people at least recog-
nize in practical shape the identity of aspiration
and interest, both in things material and in things
higher, which with us must be widespread through
the masses of our people if our national life is to
attain full development. This spirit of brother-
hood recognizes of necessity both the need of self-
help and also the need of helping others in the only
way which ever ultimately does great good, that
is, of helping them to help themselves. Every
man of us needs such help at some time or other,
and each of us should be glad to stretch out his
hand to a brother who stumbles. But while every
man needs at times to be lifted up when he stum-
bles, no man can afford to let himself be carried,
and it is worth no man's while to try thus to cany
some one else. The man who lies down, who will
not try to walk, has become a mere cumberer of
the earth's surface.

Tliese associations of yours try to make men
self-helpful and to help them when they are self-
helpful. They do not try merely to carry them,
to benefit them for the moment at the cost of their
future tmdoing. This means that all in any way^
connected with them not merely retain but in-
crease their self-respect. Any man who takes
part in the work of such an organization is bene-
fited to some extent and benefits the community

Christian Citizenship 307

to some extent — of course, always with the proviso
that the organization is well managed and is run on
a business basis, as well as with a philanthropic
purpose.

The feeling of brotherhood is necessarily as
remote from a patronizing spirit, on the one hand,
as from a spirit of envy and malice, on the other.
The best work for our uplifting must be done by
ourselves, and yet with brotherly kindness for our
neighbor. In such work, and therefore in the kind
of work done by the Yoimg Men's Christian Asso-
ciations, we all stand on the self-respecting basis
of mutual benefit and common effort. All of us
who take part in any such work, in whatever
measiu-e, both receive and confer benefits. This
is true of the foimder and giver, and it is no less
true of every man who takes advantage of what
the foimder and giver have done. These bodies
make us all realize how much we have in common,
and how much we can do when we work in com-
mon. I doubt if it is possible to overestimate the
good done by the mere fact of association with a
common interest and for a common end, and when
the common interest is high and the common end
peculiarly worthy, the good done is of course
many times increased.

Besides developing this sense of brotherhood,
the feeling which breeds respect both for one's self
and for others, your associations have a peculiar

3o8 The Strenuous Life

value in showing what can be done by acting
in combination without aid from the State. While
on the one hand it has become evident that imder
the conditions of modem life we cannot allow an
unlimited individualism, which may work harm to
the commtmity, it is no less evident that the
sphere of the State's action should be extended
very cautiously, and so far as possible only where
it will not crush out healthy individual initiative.
Voluntary action by individuals in the form of
associations of any kind for mutual betterment or
mutual advantage often offers a way to avoid
alike the dangers of State control and the dangers
of excessive individualism. This is particularly
true of efforts for that most important of all forms
of betterment, moral betterment — the moral bet-
terment which usually brings material betterment
in its train.

It is only in this way, by all of tis working
together in a spirit of brotherhood, by each doing
his part for the betterment of himself and of others
that it is possible for us to solve the tremendous
problems with which as a nation we are now con-
fronted. Our industrial life has become so com-
plex, its rate of movement so very rapid, and the
specialization and differentiation so intense that
we find ourselves face to face with conditions that
were practically tmknown in this nation half a
Qcntury ago. The power of the forces of evil has

Christian Citizenship 309

been greatly increased, and it is necessary for
our self-preservation that we should sinrilarly
strengthen the forces for good. We are all of us
bound to work toward this end. No one of us can
do eveiything, but each of us can do something,
and if we work together the aggregate of these
somethings will be very considerable.

There are, of cotirse^a thousand different ways
in which the work can be done, and each man
must choose as his tastes and his powers bid him,
if he is to do the best of which he is capable. But
all the kinds of work must be carried along on cer-
tain definite lines if good is to come. All the work
must be attempted as on the whole this Yotmg
Men's Christian Association work has been done,
that is, in a spirit of good will toward all and not
of hatred toward some; in a spirit in which to
broad charity for mankind there is added a keen
and healthy sanity of mind. We must retain our
self-resp^t, each and all of us, and we must be-
ware alike of mushy sentimentality and of envy
and hatred.

It ought not to be necessary for me to warn you
against mere sentimentality, against the philan-
thropy and charity which are not merely insuf-
ficient but harmful. It is eminently desirable
that we should none of us be hard-heaxted, but it
is no less desirable that we should not be soft-
headed. I really do not know which quality is

jxo The Strenuous Life

most productive of evil to mankind in the long
run, hardness of heart or softness of head. Naked
charity is not what we permanently want. There
are of course certain classes, such as young chil-
dren, widows with large families, or crippled or
very aged people, or even strong men temporarily
crushed by sttmning misfortime, on whose behalf
we may have to make a frank and direct appeal to
charity, and who can be the recipients of it with-
out any loss of self-respect. But taking us as a
whole, taking the mass of Americans, we do not
want charity, we do not want sentimentality; we
merely want to learn how to act both individually
and together in such fashion as to enable us to hold
our own in the world, to do good to others accord-
ing to the measure of our opportunities, and to
receive good from others in ways which will not
entail on our part any loss of self-respect.

It ought to be tmnecessary to say that any man
who tries to solve the great problems that con-
front us by an appeal to anger and passion, to
ignorance and folly, to malice and envy, is not, and
never can be, aught but an enemy of the very peo-
ple he professes to befriend. In the words of
Lowell, it is far safer to adopt "All men up" than
"Some men down" for a motto. Speaking
broadly, we cannot in the long run benefit one
man by the downfall of another. Our energies,
as a rule, can be employed to much better advan-

Christian Citizenship 3x1

tage in uplifting some than in pulling down others.
Of course there must sometimes be pulling down,
too. We have no business to blink evils, and
where it is necessary that the knife should be used,
let it be used unsparingly, but let it be used intel-
ligently. When there is need of a drastic remedy,
apply it, but do not apply it in the spirit of hate.
Normally a poimd of construction is worth a ton
of destruction.

There is degradation to us if we feel envy and
malice and hatred toward our neighbor for any
cause ; and if we envy him merely his riches, we
show we have ourselves low ideals. Money is a
good thing. It is a foolish affectation to deny it.
But it is not the only good thing, and after a cer-
tain amoimt has been amassed it ceases to be the
chief even of material good things. It is far better,
for instance, to do well a bit of work which is well
worth doing, than to have a large fortune. I do
not care whether this work is that of an engineer
on a great railroad, or captain of a fishing-boat, or
foreman in a factory or machine-shop, or section
boss, or division chief, or assistant astronomer in
an observatory, or a second lieutenant somewhere
in China or the Philippines — each has an impor-
tant piece of work to do, and if he is really inter-
ested in it, and has the right stuff in him, he will be
altogether too proud of what he is doing, and too
intent on doing it well, to waste his time in envying

3X2 The Strenuous Life

others. From the days when the chosen people re-
ceived the Decalogue to our own, envy and malice
have been recognized as evils, and woe to those
who appeal to them. To break the Tenth Com-
mandment is no more moral now than it has been
for the past thirty centuries. The vice of envy is
not only a dangerous but also a mean vice, for it is
always a confession of inferiority. It may pro-
voke conduct which will be fruitful of wrong-doing
to others, and it must cause misery to the man who
feels it. It will not be any the less fruitful of
wrong and misery if, as is so often the case with
evil motives, it adopts some high-sounding alias.
The truth is that each one of us has in him certain
passions and instincts which if they gained the
upper hand in his soul would mean that the wild
beast had come uppermost in him. Envy, malice,
and hatred are such passions, and they are just as
bad if directed against a class or group of men as
if directed against an individual. What we need
in our leaders and teachers is help in suppressing
such feelings, help in arousing and directing the
feelings that are their extreme opposites. Woe to us
as a nation if we ever follow the lead of men who
seek not to smother but to inflame the wild-beast
qualities of the htunan heart ! In social and indus-
trial no less than in political reform we can do
healthy work, work fit for a free republic, fit for
self-governing democracy, only by treading in the

Christian Citizenship 313

footsteps of Washington and Franklin and Adams
and Patrick Henry, and not in the steps of Marat
and Robespierre.

So far, what I have had to say has dealt mainly
with our relations to one another in what may be
called the service of the State. But the basis of
good citizenship is the home. A man must be a
good son, husband, and father, a woman a good
daughter, wife, and mother, first and foremost.
There must be no shirking of duties in big things
or in little things. The man who will not work
hard for his wife and his little ones, the woman
who shrinks from bearing and rearing many
healthy children, these have no place among the
men and women who are striving upward and
onward. Of course the family is the foimdation
of all things in the State. Sins against pure and
healthy family life are those which of all others
are sure in the end to be visited most heavily upon
the nation in which they take place. We must
beware, moreover, not merely of the great sins,
but of the lesser ones which when taken together
cause such an appalling aggregate of misery and
wrong. The dnmkard, the lewd liver, the coward,
the liar, the dishonest man, the man who is brutal
to or neglectful of parents, wife, or children— of
all of these the shrift should be short when we
speak of decent citizenship. Every ounce of
effort for good in your associations is part of the

3X4 The Strenuous Life

ceaseless war against the traits which produce
such men. But in addition to condemning the
grosser forms of evil we must not forget to con-
demn also the evils of bad temper, lack of gentle-
ness, nagging and whining fretfulness, lack of
consideration for others — the evils of selfishness
in all its myriad forms. Each man or woman
must remember his or her duty to all aroimd, and
especially to those closest and nearest, and such
remembrance is the best possible preparation for
doing duty for the State as a whole.

We ask that these associations, and the men
and women who take part in them, practise the
Christian doctrines which are preached from every
true pulpit. The Decalogue and the Golden Rule
must stand as the foimdation of every successful
effort to better either our social or our political life.
*' Fear the Lord and walk in His ways " and " Love
thy neighbor as thyself" — when we practise these
two precepts, the reign of social and civic right-
eousness will be close at hand. Christianity
teaches not only that each of us must so live
as to save his own soul, but that each must also
strive to do his whole duty by his neighbor. We
cannot live up to these teachings as we should;
for in the presence of infinite might and infinite
wisdom, the strength of the strongest man is but
weakness, and the keenest of mortal eyes see but
dimly. But each of us can at least strive, as light

Christian Citizenship 315

and strength are given him, toward the ideal.
Effort along any one line will not suffice. We
must not only be good, but strong. We must not
only be high-minded, but brave-hearted. We
must think loftily, and we must also work hard.
It is not written in the Holy Book that we must
merely be harmless as doves. It is also written
that we must be wise as serpents. Craft unaccom-
panied by conscience makes the crafty man a
social wild beast who preys on the commimity
and must be hunted out of it. Gentleness and
sweetness unbacked by strength and high resolve
are almost impotent for good.

The true Christian is the true citizen, lofty of
purpose, resolute in endeavor, ready for a hero's
deeds, but never looking down on his task because
it is cast in the day of small things ; scornful of
baseness, awake to his own duties as well as to his
rights, following the higher law with reverence,
and in this world doing all that in him lies, so that
when death comes he may feel that mankind is in
some degree better because he has lived.

3 tlDS 002 Hft? 002

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Full text of "The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses"

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